I'm really coming around to Bernie's argument that every billionaire represents a policy failure. I also hope that there is some form of consequence imposed upon these billionaires when this regime falls. Their companies should be broken up, they should pay much higher taxes, and ideally, shunned from all polite society. Alas, I'm probably hoping for too much.
They need to be taxed out of existence. I am convinced at this point that achieving billionaire status is not indicative of success, intelligence, or merit, but rather it is indicative of a severely flawed character. It is indicative of obscene greed. It is indicative of a hole in the soul where philanthropy, charity, and patriotism should be. It is indicative of disregard for duty to one's employees, community, and society.
Agreed. My wife and I were discussing this. There is some number of dollars - I'm guessing tens of millions, but I'm willing to debate - that a person can work hard and earn without hurting anyone else. But beyond some point, you literally have to hurt others to make more than that. Legally destroy your competitors, stifle innovation and competition, screw over your own employees to increase profits, etc.
Large amounts of money require you to be a sociopath to get there. Extremely large amounts of money breed extreme sociopaths.
I like this way of framing the issue. I've known small business owners that have built nice companies worth 10s of millions. They didn't hurt anyone, usually very involved in community efforts, spent locally, etc. I don't ever want to see these people as villains. But at some point beyond this, it gets gross.
The conversation you are having with your wife is an interesting one. Each billionaire has a choice, and there is quite a contrast between how Jeff Bezos seems to be using his wealth and how Mackenzie Scott (Jeff's ex-wife) is using hers. If Wikipedia is accurate, she has donated $26.3 billion to over 1,600 charities as of December 2025.
FYI - if you talk with anyone in the nonprofit space who has applied for Mackenzie Scott's grants, they have an extremely robust and well vetted system to make sure her money is having a positive impact. She's doing a lot of good.
It kind of boggles the mind how much better many of the billionaires could be doing for the society that produced them. They could become famous, historically remembered, for great works of philanthropy, or fostering the arts, or advancing research... and yet... they only seem to spend on domination and control, or "keeping up with the Joneses" style competition with other billionaire chuds.
I take nothing away from Mackenzie Scott or Melinda Gates. They are true philanthropists. However, there is an argument to be made that they should pay taxes instead because, theoretically at least, we all have a say in how tax money is spent for the good of society. Why should billionaires be allowed to define the agenda?
I don’t doubt that they would have happily paid higher taxes, had that been the rule, or would in the future. Because it wasn’t in the tax structure, they are giving it away.
She wasn’t the one either the greed gene. I’m sure she was a part of the business at some point (in the 10s millions), she has not been a part in years.
I would counter with Warren Buffet as an example of someone seemingly not corrupted by vast wealth, or Bezos ex who is using her billions for constructive philanthropy. Throw in Kristy Noem as a non billionaire who seems to fit your description of a destructive sociopath who thrives on hurting others, including her pets. Net worth doesn't define the issue....but the destructive capability of the corrupt individual is massively exacerbated by wealth and a position of power.
He strikes me as being from a different era, with a certain sense of noblesse oblige. He also seems to acknowledge that his wealth is somewhat of a right-place-right-time phenomenon, without being self deprecating about it.
I had a moment years ago where I realized that very rich people only care about money and that's why they're rich and the rest of us just want a comfortable life and our kids to be okay.
Hard to imagine that there aren't some poor and middle-class people who only care about money. It was noted by other commenters here that billionaires rely considerably on luck to get where they are. That implies there are some that want to be billionaires (ie, only care about money) but are simply unlucky.
Your comment is quite thought-provoking, Eric, and I appreciate the respectful counters, where others have offered positive examples of a few who are "good billionaires".
I would love to see the Bulwark produce a podcast on the topic. Perhaps they could get Pritzker to join a discussion about the debatable value, and the moral responsibilities, of billionaires?
I've heard the suggestion that the limit ought to be $100 million (adjusted for inflation in the future). And to me that makes sense; that's enough that a person could withdraw about $4 million/year (before taxes) without ever running out of money. That certainly allows for a lavish lifestyle, but it's not enough to buy the federal government.
Whatever the limit is, it's not anything close to a billion, that's for sure!
I think the motivation to amass an enormous amount of wealth, beyond what anyone could possibly need, is social status. The old they-want-to-be-in-the-room-where-it-happens drive. The amount of the wealth is your ticket into those rooms.
I have to say, though, that part of the reason they managed to *become* billionaires is because they are often psychopathic personalities. It's well known in psych circles that kids who exhibit the dark triad traits (Psychopathy, Narcissism, & Machiavellianism) will usually become either a CEO or a serial killer. They're just different sides of the same coin. This doesn't EXCUSE the hole in their soul that you bring up - it simply explains that it is often HOW they are able to be so horrid as to disregard their duty to their fellow man, writ large.
“ It's well known in psych circles that kids who exhibit the dark triad traits (Psychopathy, Narcissism, & Machiavellianism) will usually become either a CEO or a serial killer” Or maybe both?
It's amazing how many more philanthropic activities and spending is done by their now divorced first wives. You know, the ones who stood by them when they weren't billionaires.
Surely there is some merit. Amazon is surely useful. SpaceX dominates the launch industry for a really good reason: their rockets are the cheapest. The problem is that the wealth is not shared evenly. And, by the way, capitalism works way better than communism, even for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Let's fix it.
I'm speaking of merit in the individual, not the companies or products they create. There are countless people in the world who have just as much merit as Bezos or more, but where the billionaire sees personal merit, I see a lot of luck, and they're loath to acknowledge the role luck plays, because then that brings into question whether they deserve their status. And I will not concede that anyone deserves to have as much as Jeff Bezos has, no matter how much personal merit they have. Everyone of us stands on the shoulders of those who came before us, enjoys the protections of a well-functioning society necessary for stability, predictability, and opportunity, and these are the realities billionaires refuse to respect and refuse to give back to.
I would also suggest that Jeff Bezos would be perfectly fine if he was unable to accumulate wealth at the rate he does.
We should strongly consider the actual opportunity cost that concentration of wealth creates. Jeff Bezos has so much money that he is slowing down the economy in probably measurable ways.
Amazon has about 1.6 million employees. Jeff Bezos has 250 billion dollars. The average rate of return of the stock market is about 8%.
Jeff Bezos will get 20 billion dollars richer next year for doing nothing.
Lets say you capped his wealth at the current level and gave that 20 billion to the 1.6 million people who work for Amazon. Each Amazon employee would get $12,500 dollar in additional income!
Sure, luck has a role in billionaires' success but that's true for everyone regardless of income level. To place luck over hard work gets silly people to buy lottery tickets instead of applying themselves. Although the billionaires are certainly not blameless, their role in our capitalist system is to maximize their income while playing by the rules. In general, the problem is the rules don't work.
Where is this rule about maximizing income? The American capitalist economy persevered for well over one hundred years before Jack Welch came along and turned things on their head by declaring that he had no duty other than to maximize shareholder profits, and he became the corporate pied piper that all the other CEOs followed along.
My gut says it comes down to personality trait differences. The Gordon Gecko “greed is good” crowd see “human capital” where you and I see actual humans.
Not a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt, but his book, “The Righteous Mind” Why good people are divided by politics and religion from 2012 is really good in explaining differences like these.
Apparently, that book is about the problems of neoliberal capitalism. I really enjoyed this book, "The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era" by historian Gary Gerstle. He says the Neoliberal order ended with the '08 Crash and that the order that will follow will be states intervening in markets to address questions of "economic security, opportunity, and welfare . . . Beneath some of the hubbub of American politics, a new political economy along these lines is indeed taking shape" (https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/cafe-econ-a-new-political-order-emerges).
Amazon may be "useful," but it exists as it is now only by having wiped out how many thousands of small businesses. Can we count that as negative utility to set against any putative (and I think they are largely putative) benefits or cost savings?
Amazon was useful and innovative when they started - now it's a different story - the enshitification of Amazon is what happens when they become that big and the customers have less choice.
SpaceX is an a similar trajectory especially now that musk is basically syphoning off all of the money the SpaceX makes in order to fund robots or whatever. You see that in Falcon 9 has 2 failures out of 605 and the Starship has 5 failures out of 11. Maybe Starship is "newer" but it's still an almost 50% failure rate.
Every new rocket starts with failures. As they say in the industry, "space is hard." Starship's failures are about what everyone expected. It is worthwhile comparing its history to that of NASA's SLS. Its rockets cost so much that they can't launch them often enough to get the bugs out and, by the time they do, their technology is obsolete. Starship is doing things the right way and SLS is not.
The nature of the space industry has changed. The reality is that, initially, there was not enough profitability in space to justify the massive investment and risk required. I am not sure that there is, even now, tbh (not without governments basically still footing the bill).
So it makes sense that the initial space industry was essentially government run, with government goals, using government practices.
It makes less sense now, but the field is still very narrow because you either need strong government subsidy or be ludicrously rich yourself to go into the business.
SLS has 6 different configurations, 2 of which are manned. Starship has 3 configurations, one of which is manned and not developed yet. Starship still has 50% failure rate which people seem to tolerate with Musk but won't tolerate with other companies (Boeing, ULA, Rocketdyne, Northrup-Grumman) NASA and the stock market would declare the end of the world for other companies.
Six configurations is very expensive (and does lead to the question of why?). Blowing up rockets because "learning" is very expensive. Manned missions don't have the risk tolerance for "learning"
With Musk sucking all the money out of SpaceX to fund robots, etc. He will cut costs at SpaceX, which will lead to more failures. This is mostly a function of Musk's ego and the next new shiny thing (robots vs. a functioning rocket company) Hence SpaceX will follow the path of enshitification but with tax payer money
Starlink, another good Musk idea, is the biggest current source of cash flowing into SpaceX’s business operations and it is growing larger every year. Musk can justify Starship as a Starlink satellite launcher alone.
As for Musk crapping on SpaceX, we can't rule it out. Still, SpaceX is very tied into NASA and the larger space community and they will not let SpaceX do anything crazy as they depend on it. SpaceX's development process is more open than its competitors and, therefore, gets more scrutiny. I doubt very much they would risk their success by cutting costs too much. After all, they are already the cheapest option by far. As it has been pointed out many times lately, their scale is the biggest reason for their safety. Launching frequently ensures that the bugs are caught. SpaceX had many more launches of Falcon 9 before sending people on it than competing rockets. Look at the failure of Boeing's manned capsule for comparison.
Debbie, you seem to know a lot about SpaceX. Every time I see a launch has ended in rapid unscheduled disassembly, which honestly seems like every launch at this point, I think about how much money just went up in flames for a private company. It's gotta be tens of billions at least. Do you know where this seemingly inexhaustible supply of funding is coming from?
It's going to take a wee bit of socialism to fix laissez faire capitalism. I never wanted to live in the Soviet union or red China either . It would be icky to share my tooth brush with the entire village.
I agree, but there can be a counterbalance in the forms of anti-trust and other regulation, as well as a significantly redistributive system. That was our system from basically the post-war years to the Reagan years, and many American companies thrived.
Yes. Government creates the playing field on which capitalists compete. It should work like the NFL which tweaks the rules yearly in order to make competition safe and fair while maximizing its entertainment value.
That's a great point. One problem is that politicians (and voters) never like to spend the money to evaluate programs adequately. And another is that there's no political incentive to admit that changes are needed in a program--it just creates a vulnerability that the other side can exploit.
You make an excellent point! In general I have come to believe that capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others. We have moved away from mores that once held corporations responsible to their employees and to the communities where they operate, which made capitalism a bit more virtuous. IMO, changes to tax policy and labor laws during the Reagan era —and following— played a major role here.
Paying a living wage should return to being the responsibility of the corporation and its customers, rather than externalized to the general taxpayer, whether that taxpayer buys products/services from the corporation or not.
If Congress were not wholly owned by corporate donors, it would be easier to change anti-trust law and tax policy to mitigate the worst harms of capitalism.
Unfortunately, too many Americans admire these people and want to be rich like them. it is the height of selfishness.
For this I blame Ronald Reagan and all who elevated and championed him and his absurd policies like "trickle down economics" which only made the rich wealthier and more influential. I don't want to hear about the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Important? Yes. But the cost of this kind of leadership to our nation and most of us has been devastating.
Uh oh Sandy are you on Jimmys side ? We can put on our red berets and redistribute the ill gotten gains of our billionaire overlords ! Sing our new national anthem with me !
" this land is your land, this land is my land....... " .
Almost every billionaire started out filthy rich, with a massive inheritance. There are exceptions; Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, but they are quite few and far between, and even in those three examples, the only one who started out with nothing is Soros.
Trump inherited the equivalent of $1bil in today's money. Musk's father owns an emerald mine in SA, along with massive RE holdings. Even the ones who didn't grow up in the midst of obscene wealth mostly grew up in white, exceedingly priveleged circumstances. The pretense of merit and the self-made man (it's usually men) is mostly a self-serving myth.
Agreed. The more I learn about the really rich, and even the pretty rich, the more I realize that the only difference between them and your accountant or dentist is not intelligence or hard work, but a willingness to cheat and dumb luck.
Even the best entrepreneurial tens-of-millionaires I know, while providing value in their industry, also had a shifty side that accounted for a lot of their success.
Ironically, it's the billionaire I know who is an angel. But he was born to both sides of that equation.
The ultra rich used feel a moral obligation, or had practical logistical reasons, to put at least *some* of their wealth back into the local community, whether because they wanted their vacation resort in St. Augustine to have people who lived there to staff it (Rockefeller) or they wanted an educated workforce (Carnegie's libraries), etc.
Today's billionaires are citizens of the globe, hoarding all their wealth and giving back nothing. If they're not going to even do the bare minimum voluntarily, they must be forced to.
Weirdly, I've seen Trump-boosters make a similar argument about the good old benevolent plutocrats vs. the bad rich "elites" of today -- and then argue that Trump's "populism" was the antidote.
Of course, they don't expect Trump to be personally generous, nor do they criticize the self-dealing of his plutocratic supporters. For some, the "populist" shtick was only about culture wars. For others, it was pure cynicism.
I recall reading that while Carnegie was putting lots of money into libraries, he didn't want to raise the pay of his workers because he believed they would spend the money unwisely.
Bernie might be right but our reaction should be to fix the policies rather than eliminate billionaires. The call to eliminate billionaires is like trying to fix gas leaks in the mines by killing canaries. We should allow for success but recognize that others contribute to that success. We do have mechanisms for that now (taxes, investing in stock, profit-sharing, employee stock options) but they just don't work very well.
In Scanidanavia they say in response to questions about taxation that you don't want to be a rich man in a poor country. Too much torch and pitchfork exposure.
Agree the focus should be on the policy choices that have enabled the enormous wealth concentration of the last few decades, not the billionaires themselves. Certainly that includes tax policy as well as deregulation and antitrust enforcement. The Dems should be running on economic policy choices that strengthen the middle class over the wealthy. They will if the voters have their back.
When the rich really got out of their skis the French and Bolshevik Revolutions happened. Both were extremely violent to even their footsoldiers and the latter gave us communism which ironically MAGA wants to copy parts of it (the worship of Dear Leader and suppression of civil liberties parts).
Basically our billionaires who've abandoned all pretext of not being the moustache twirling caricatures of billionaires should keep that in mind....
It used to be called the "Estate Tax", and everyone was fine with it. Then the Republicans re-named it a "Death Tax" and suddenly everyone wanted it gone, including people who would only inherit sums MUCH lower than the tax threshold.
Edit: a million dollars is less than a 1,000 dollars to normal people. Sooo bizarre how everyone runs to speak up for her— when she doesn’t for herself. She’s gone MAGA coded as in— she hasn’t said anything about ICE using her music.
Same. Turns out there is no benevolent billionaire. What’s Ms Swift doing with her money?
Taylor Swift is a major philanthropist, donating at least $6.5 million in 2025 alone to disaster relief, food banks, and health causes. Major 2025 donations include $5 million to Feeding America for hurricane relief, $1 million to the American Heart Association, and $1 million to various Nashville-based nonprofits.
She also quietly donates big money to food banks in every city she tours in. And she treats her staff exceptionally well - not just those on stage w her, but all the way down the line, handing out bonuses that came to about $200M out of her own pocket. Really confused why she was singled out and also the "embarrasses herself" line. Like, how? I feel as though I am taking crazy pills having read that comment.
EVERYTHING she donated in tour cities (mostly to food banks and children's hospitals) was done quietly. The recipients talked about the donations, NOT Ms. Swift OR her team. During COVID lockdown, she paid a fan's rent so she didn't get evicted. Right after the tour ended, she visited sick children in her adopted home of Kansas City & sent a little girl there an exact, correctly-sized replica of the designer outfit she'd worn because the girl loved fashion & the otufit so much. Before COVID, she used to invite a group of fans to her own home to have a listening party with her right before an album dropped. The woman KNOWS where she came from and WHO keeps her at the top. She also pays very well AND provides health insurance to all of her people (band, dancers, back-up singers, etc), which is unheard-of in the music business from what I understand. Would that I was so embarrassing a human.
Only when her publicist can leak that info. She doesn’t care. She maybe did once— not now. Money rots people. Sure she “takes care of her people” I guess—but that’s not THAT unusual for successful artists.
Also, Swift did not amass her billions by suppressing others, or stifling "competition", or using her power to manipulating prices/venues. Not sure why Swift is introduced here.....
A million dollars is less than 1,000 dollars to normal people. She also — just partnered with— Disney — for what? Money money money money money— all the releasing of her music to block other artists? Bb grow up -we are almost 40.
She writes everything off. She is the richest, most successful artist in history— but can’t find the time to tell the administration to fuck off for using her music for torture porn?
I don’t buy it. Every other artist has.
She has enough money to make lasting change. Doesn’t even have to be political, food banks certainly shouldn’t be— but call me when Taylor donates like 100 million. She wouldn’t even notice.
Sadly, she’s like the rest of these cowards. She can’t stand to be on the outs. She needed to go MAGA coded to stay on top.
This gives me no pleasure. Folklore makes me cry. I don’t want to tear down a successful woman, certainly not a person who is a musician—but being a “feminist billionaire” who donates a few million here or there is not a flex— let’s be real — she’s tossing pennies in a pond, whilst yawning.
Not sure where this dismissal of Taylor Swift comes from, but from everything I've read and heard about her, unlike the techbros, she doesn't think she's a god.
I'm not a swiftie but have come to admire her. And she has worked for everything she has.
MAGA coded> Why because you think she's endorsing the tradwife lifestyle because of some of her latest looks and that she is engaged, loves her fiance, and wants to have kids? Since when does that make someone anti-feminist? Trump and the right wing loons have attacked her and she has stood up to them. She endorsed Harris and encouraged her fans to register and vote.
And of course you dismiss what we know of her charity as "told by her publicist." Damned if she does, damned if she doesn't.
What do you want from her? To renounce her career, give away all her money, wear a hairshirt, and attack men?
Letting her music be used for the ice videos? That is MAGA coded.
The last few years she has only stayed on top because she milks her fans for every penny. She releases the same song over and over to manipulate the charts.
Come on. She hasn’t always behaved like this, she used to go hard at Trump.
The publicist thing isn’t unusual—and I’m writing off the charity donation —JUST LIKE SHE DOES.
She could do real shit, for her country— She chooses not to.
Eh, I think Taylor is fine as far as billionaires go. She seems to respect others, contributes a lot more to charitable and social causes than most people in her position, and does individual volunteer work as well with sick kids. I've never seen Elon Musk talk to a sick kid in a hospital, as an example.
Is she my hero? No. Should billionaires exist? No. We agree on that. But, if we are to suffer billionaires for now, would it be nice if more of them were like Swift than like Bezos or Musk? I think so.
I personally don't see the 'MAGA coded' thing, either implicitly or explicitly. She endorsed Harris, Trump's opponent, and put out an anti-Trump diss-tract on Lover in 2019. She's perennially surrounded by members of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color, in a way that does not match the white supremacist "central casting" of MAGA. I've never heard her once express any America First viewpoints - let me know if you've seen her calling for mass deportations or territorial conquest. Could she do more to disavow Trump? Maybe. I'll take her advocating for gay rights and supporting Democrats though without much fuss on my end.
As far as Folklore/Evermore, I've talked to swift fans who really liked that sound but seem subsequently disappointed with everything else. That to me is fairly normal and not unique to Swift. I love 90s Green Day better than 00s and 10s Green Day. Favorite Worst Nightmare by Arctic Monkeys is better than Humbug or Suck It and See or their later works. But if I want that sound I can just listen to those albums again. Funnily enough, the people who seem to love The Life of a Showgirl have been dudes like me. Actually Romantic struck a Weezer-stan nerve in my body, and if Swift reignites interest in todays youth in 90s alt rock I am so here for that revival.
I don’t listen to Taylor Swift, and I agree with the broader point that there’s no such thing as a truly benevolent billionaire under capitalism. But I’m not sure “embarrassing herself” quite fits here.
From what I can see, she does at least make a point of paying her staff well and sharing a significant amount of her tour income with the people who make it possible, as well as donating to charities in the places she visits. That doesn’t make her a hero or absolve the system that enables extreme wealth, but it does materially benefit workers and communities.
For me, the more productive critique is about the structures that allow this level of wealth accumulation in the first place, rather than personal ridicule. There’s room to hold both ideas at once.
She hasn’t even bothered to say anything about them using her music.
As far as embarrassing herself — on the same week of the Epstein files, us attacking the rest of the world, what has she been up to? Releasing the same shitty music to bloc younger artists.
Yes, Pattie! It's the structures - tax policy, deregulation and mergers. You know, the rigged system.
It's hard for people to grasp systems and easy to demonize those who benefit from it. If Bulwark subscribers fail to see the structures, getting a majority of the electorate who don't benefit from the system to see them is gonna take a lot of work - educating, messaging and messengers. Bernie's got the right message, but he's not the messenger for reaching the vast middle. That's why he lost the Democratic presidential primary. Twice.
I’ve been a Bernie fan for years and years, and I think his primary losses for many, came because of his age. There was once some idea that at a reasonable age, people retired. They got old. For some reason, our elected officials do not want to retire. That’s a shame because they do little in their last years. Bernie is the exception. So are others. But you should not put them into the pressure cooker of the Presidency. I supported Joe Biden when he said he would be the bridge president, only one term. With one of the best administrations, he left vilified. And this current fool? Can’t even try to say how bad he is.
Of course the structure is awful— THAT TAYLOR IS A PART OF. She helps hold this system in place. She puts her neck out there for nothing. Not since 2020 anyway.
Bill Gates certainly did a lot of good with his billions but I guess he now has Epstein problems. Perhaps your slogan should be "no billionaire is benevolent all the time".
A lot of the criticisms of billionaires are valid. Bezos' wedding is Exhibit "A". One of the most grotesque displays of wealth in history. It's a slippery slope, however, to place your idea of whether what someone else is contributing, charitably, is enough. Sorry, but not your call.
I used to work for a billionaire (definitely earned his money through a lifetime of work and employed thousands of people), but his wife would fly on their jet to have lunch with Oprah and then fly home after. This is the shit that they all do now and it doesn't benefit anyone (pollution being one major thing).
All of them could do more. I look to the ex-wives of Gates and Bezos for the model behaviors. TayTay does some stuff, but agree that she could also do more.
Oh, absolutely. Years ago I just thought the "policy failure" line was just a catchy slogan. And maybe that's its genesis, depending on when Bernie started saying it.
But these guys have the power of huge NGOs, and wield it capriciously and vindictively. That's a threat to civic stability.
It may be apocryphal, but there's a story that FDR, when signing a New Deal-era bill with a huge tax increase on the highest earners, proclaimed, "This one's for Hearst!"
I want that level of animosity from a post-MAGA president toward our oligarchs. Why shouldn't the leaders we favor want to rein in . . . or, I'll say it: punish . . . Musk? HE WANTS TO HURT YOU AND REGULARLY SAYS SO.
Want the trappings of American citizenship and commerce? Pay up. Or go somewhere that'll put up with your bullshit.
Honestly, my ultimate goal with Musk in particular is that he (stupidly) chooses to live in Russia or China. Have fun with THAT freedom, dude.
I think you can also make national security and public safety arguments for both a maximum income and a maximum net worth. I don't know what the exact numbers should be but there do need to be maximums.
Individuals who have enough money to afford their own intelligence organizations and police forces clearly have far too much money and are a threat to the security and safety of everyone else.
My thought is that anything that gets big enough to be an existential threat to be united states can be taken down as a preventive measure by the united states. Another words we the people have the right of self defense. Buy whatever means necessary.
I've been on the Bernie bandwagon for a very long time. Set the top tax rate at 90% again, just like it was in the '50s, the time that MAGA wants to return to (albeit for very different reasons). We put ppl on the Moon, created the middle class, and had the best economy in the history of the world at the time. Now we just have a bunch of greedy fucks who only want more, the consequences to the rest of us be damned.
Know what would happen if we taxed the richest people in the world at a much MUCH higher rate? They'd still be the richest people in the world.
I forget who said it, and it's obviously anecdotal, but someone said that, having been around a lot of very wealthy people, it seems that they lose their grip on reality around $300mil net worth. Take that FWIW.
Make it a very high threshold. If Bezos/Musk/et al paid the same tax rate as a teacher, that would bring quite a lot.
The money has become irrelevant. Now they're just trying to one-up each other. Elon just wants to be the first get to the four-commas level and that's it.
i just don’t think the actual amount of someone’s wealth is a problem. or even the massive gap in wealth between different members of the society is. as long as the same rules are applied to everyone equally, i don’t see why it’s necessarily wrong or immoral to be a billionaire. i also don’t think that philanthropy is required from billionaires. on the contrary charity seems to be a hack to fix failures of a disfunctional state and society. a functioning state would use the collected taxes to cover what now is being paid for by charities. as for the concrete case of WaPo, well, it’s unfortunate that its fate is decided by a single amoral rich person, but if people feel really strong about it, nothing seems to prevent them from organizing, chipping in and buying the newspaper out. Ultimately destruction of a single newspaper can’t be detrimental to such a “strong”, “healthy”, and “long-lasting” democracy as the United States are…
The amount of money IS a problem, when it becomes so great that the rich person can essentially buy the government (which is what Musk did in the last election).
i also think that 5 corrupt (or motivated by wrong partisanship) supreme judges are a much worse problem than any number of billionaires. if not the judges themselves then definitely is the system that allows 5 individuals to throw out all balances and constraints on the executive power of the state. and by the way you don’t need billions to buy these judges. probably a motivated group of not too affluent people could chip in a few millions to pocket one or two supreme judges.
the amount is a problem because the gvt can be bought. by the same measure it could be bought by a foreign state, which is essentially what Putin does. He owns Russia (more or less single-handedly) and can use the money to buy foreign governments if they’re up for sale. So again if money can afford a single amoral person to wreak havoc in a long-standing democracy, something is wrong with the 77mln dimwits and not with the money.
Even if you don't think every billionaire is a policy failure, I do think it is completely fair to say that unless and until every kid is fed and housed in this country, that most people are able to see their doctor, and when general want is addressed such that we can focus on secondary and tertiary endeavors, yeah, the stratification is pants-on-head bananas.
I'm in Seattle. We used to have Bezos and Gates here as dueling richest people in the world until Musk entered the chat and he and Bezos could fight over having literal rockets in their backyard. Meanwhile we're means testing poor folks for oatmeal. Like, what?
The first name of one of the two men who shot Alex Pretti was “Jesus (Ochoa)”. The other guy was “Raymundo Gutierrez”. Convict them of homicide, revoke their citizenship, and deport them, say, to Venezuela? ICE out.
The death of The Washington Post is one of those stories that I really need to moderate myself with because if I don’t, I will become wildly angry about something I can't change. I mean, Ferris Bueller showed better care for Cameron's dad's car than Bezos did with this institution.
Speaking of The Atlantic, would you all grant me permission to be petty (and maybe even preachy) for a moment?
Look at Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and what they are doing with their money.
Now look at Laurene Powell Jobs, Melinda French Gates, and MacKenzie Scott. These women know what to do with money. They understand that power is responsibility, and they wield it like a saber. They make these boy billionaires look like sad chumps. And you won't find them hanging out with Epstein.
I just want to compliment you on this phrase: "I mean, Ferris Bueller showed better care for Cameron's dad's car than Bezos did with this institution."
Your entire post is great, but I really love that phrase.
So the paper that once proudly proclaimed, "Democracy Dies in Darkness," is now increasingly spreading darkness even as it goes down the drain. The main Bezos legacy will not be that he was a billionaire, an entrepreneur, an innovator or anything else positive. It's that he was a coward and an amazingly greedy sell-out who sold his soul, if he ever had one, just so he could make more money than he or anyone could ever need. What a shameful record to leave behind.
Never thought I would say this, but Walmart. Not perfect by any means, but seems to be an improvement. I've been surprised to find that nothing I've needed from Amazon (and I buy a lot of hard-to-find items) hasn't been available there. I'm currently trying to see how long I can go without having to order anything from Amazon, it's been a couple weeks, so it's at least not worth having Prime anymore.
Very unfortunately Amazon gives me access to someone who sells items I can no longer find anywhere. A weird light bulb in a weird appliance. A doohickey essential to make something keep working. Regular stores - even an electrical supply store- no longer carry these things, probably because Amazon does. Vicious cycle.
It's fascinating how our choices are framed these days. Walmart, target, Amazon. I was looking for a decent humidifier with certain specs in mind and ended up buying from Amazon for the first time in about half a year or so. It was slightly painful, but with sickness and family members having respiratory issues at home, it was a moment of perceived necessity. But another curiosity is what level of inconvenience I allow for myself.
Thanks for mentioning this. I've occasionally turned to Walmart, but haven't considered it a real alternative because...well, it's Walmart, and I've assumed it's just as bad. But what with each new Bezos cave to Trump (eg, the Melania movie), I'm reconsidering - at least for situations in which going other routes other than A and W seems really tough or impossible.
Does anyone still get 2-day delivery from Amazon? I don't see it lasting much longer myself, but I've become a pessimist. Anyway, their deliveries are getting less and less reliable.
Varies for me. I get prescription stuff the next day for the most part. That does not hurt my feelings. I think if they sub let stuff like clothing to a third party, there are delays
For a lot of reasons, but largely because Amazon has "most favored nation" status with anyone who sells on their platform. They're not allowed to sell their products for cheaper anywhere else, even on their own websites. So any Amazon competitor is selling things for more money right off the bump.
Yes, I’m not assuming that a competitor could sell for cheaper than Amazon. I’m assuming that the anti-Trump forces in this country would switched to supporting the competitor.
I'm retired now, but over the years of my career one of the things I learned was to be suspicious of company Mission Statements. Suspicious first because it seemed odd that creating such a thing should feel necessary. And second because invariably, the Mission Statement was quite often aspirational in its nature, and at worst simply a mirror image of what the company actually was.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I should have seen this coming at WAPO.
Your comment makes a lot of sense, but I'll still beg to differ. When the Post originally adopted the Democracy Dies in Darkness theme, it made eminent sense in view of Trump's drive to spread the darkness. And it now makes more sense than ever, but for Bezos utterly selling out.
I think he just wanted to be an astronaut and NASA wouldn’t take him because of his weird eye. Creating a ruthless business empire to fund his own space ship was his elaborate workaround.
The last 2 days of the Triad were some of my favorites, both because of the actual writing and the community’s comments. We all make each other smarter.
The Epstein files combined with the Bezos story really has me out here once again emphasizing that BILLIONAIRES SHOULD NOT EXIST. Late stage capitalism sure is something, right?!?!
My heart hurts for everyone at The Post. These are real people whose lives were just completely upended, and it makes me sick.
When I was at Amazon, I had many chances to see Jeff work up close. His behavior can be befuddling and weird, but it is consistent in its peculiarity.
I once got onto the shuttle between the two Seattle campuses and found it was just me and Jeff. I’d been in meetings with him, of course, but I knew I’d probably never have another chance to talk to him one-on-one. So I put a question to him that had been bugging me.
Amazon used a process they called “topgrading.”¹ Every year, as part of performance reviews, each manager’s team would be “stack-ranked” from lowest to highest performer — no ties allowed. The people at the top would be promoted; the people at the bottom would be fired.
I think this was my second year at Amazon, so I’d seen the process once already and was disturbed by it. So I asked him: how is this reasonable? Imagine we created a skunk-works — a team composed entirely of the people who’d just been promoted across the whole company. [This was not entirely hypothetical; there were skunk-works going on then for brands you probably use every day.] The next year, a percentage of those best and brightest would have to be fired no matter what, right? “How does that make any sense?”
Jeff replied that he was on the board of the Institute for Advanced Study. “You know what IAS is, right? In Princeton? Einstein. The best minds in the country — the world. And I got them to adopt topgrading. If IAS can do it, anyone can.” Then he took a phone call and ignored me for the rest of the trip.
It was an answer that flummoxed me at the time. He hadn’t answered me; he’d simply asserted, “you’re wrong and I’ve already doubled down.”
At Amazon there was a game people played where they’d claim to be on a secret “Jeff project” as a display of power. If they really were on one, putting up roadblocks or even asking about it was suicidal. But falsely claiming to be on one could get you fired — or worse. I saw it from both sides (both legitimate sides, to be clear — I never lied about being on a secret Jeff project), and it just created pointless palace intrigue and backstabbing. Jeff seemed to like it that way.
I’ve written before about his penchant for summarily firing entire groups whose work he didn’t understand, just to see if we could do without them. Frequently I had to plead with management not to go through with it — or to hire the same people back as hourly consultants at five times the cost. Jeff called these exercises “forcing functions.” In that light, the chaos of DOGE made perfect sense to me: just force-function the whole damned civil service.
That’s Jeff’s “rationalism”: make bold claims and never reexamine them in light of results; build structures that center him as the sole decider, but then absent himself from the actual decisions for plausible deniability.
What’s happening at the Washington Post looks like more of the same.
—
¹ The term “topgrading” comes from the hiring and performance-management system popularized by Brad Smart in *Topgrading* (1990s), itself influenced by earlier forced-ranking systems such as GE’s “vitality curve” under Jack Welch.
I have been in the business world for 40 years now and as high up in leadership as a Senior Director. The one thing I have learned is that most company presidents and CEO's aren't that bright. A lot of them attain their position by some form of bullying or connections, not necessarily performance.
I interviewed for a leadership position and made it to being one of two finalists. They selected the other candidate and to be honest it was the right decision for them. During that process I learned a lot about that company (culture, people, process) and they are pretty f***** up in general.
Amazon is successful at this point because of momentum and not leadership.
Don’t forget market dominance and predatory practices.
(I am 100% JOKING on that, and it is complete satire and humor so anyone empowered to enforce any part of my nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreement that may still be enforceable today need not be worried about it, just in case anyone is wondering, okay, good, glad we had this conversation. Oh — and mumble mumble Fair Use Doctrine, too, no infringement intended.)
Indeed. I remember at one all-hands meeting someone asking, “what are we going to do about the turnover rate? It’s becoming impossible to hire in the Seattle area, and predicating every new position on a relocation is a high source of friction.”
Jeff looked puzzled, called on the head of HR, and said “what’s the turnover rate? Just at corp?” I don’t remember the exact figure, but it was at least 25% and I think quite a bit higher — it was a number that was astonishing to me, and you heard gasps in the audience gathered in the Seattle theater rented out for the occasion. Let’s say 30%. “It’s holding steady year-over-year at 30%.”
Hearing this, Jeff turned back to the questioner: “See, it’s holding steady. We’re good.”
I'm not against wealth or money per se; I'm against the abuses it engenders and allows. Like power, it can corrupt absolutely. it is the rare person—the Warren Buffets, the FDRs, the TRs—who do not lose sight of what's real or give up their souls. It seems the richer people get, the greedier they get. Having it all isn't enough. They. want. more.
Unfortunately, since the 1980s, Americans have been trained to hate taxes; even the poorest among us think, all I need is a break—like winning powerball or the state lottery—and I can be just as wealthy as them. I don't want them to take my money either! Delusional, of course.
Very interesting. Maybe the underlying reasoning is this - knowing that the bottom of every team is getting fired, and there definitely is going to be a bottom in every team makes everyone willing to sacrifice more to outcompete their teammates. This is "good for the company".
Unfortunately, it doesn't respect the reality of a lot of people's lives or dignity, especially if they have family or health priorities that make them less able to outcompete peers. It probably doesn't help most people's mental health either. But hey, those things don't necessarily make for max profit and growth either.
Maybe it's ok if a business is clear with people that this is what they are signing up for, but it not the kind of business or world I would want to live in. Law of the jungle, with suits and surrounding civilization to allow it to look nice.
You’re absolutely right. I remember spending one Thanksgiving dinner at my home desk, trying to eat and engage with the rest of the party across the apartment while doing whatever I’d been paged for. When I finally could take my seat again (for coffee and the remnants of dessert) someone asked how often I had to work nights, weekends, and holidays.
Someone else (not at Amazon, but doing the same sort of work) pointed out that it would be trivial to do a database query to see what days I’d had off even if you presume I checked messages every day by looking to see how often I’d used “sudo”, a program that’s used to control and monitor the use of administrative access. (The joke goes, “Make me a sandwich.” “What?? Make it yourself.” “Sudo make me a sandwich.” “Okay.”) Find days when I hadn’t “sudo’d”, and you’d basically find days I was truly “off”.
So right there at the holiday table, I ran the query for them over the prior year, and it turned up no results. Odd. My friend suggested I check for dates before I started work to see if my query was bad. Nope — it spit out every date before I started, none after. “Try searching for the last 12-hour period you didn’t sudo.”
I discovered that by that criteria — the last time I’d had TWELVE HOURS to myself, including sleeping, vacations, and having and recovering from a tonsillectomy — after my first month when I was training up, there had been two times in the four years I’d been there. *Two.*
I left the company and came back to New York less than six months later.
I haven't ever worked in an environment like that, but I think I can understand why you would leave.
I think big picture - if people want to give complete control of life to a company that's ok, if it's their choice. The rub to me is when most of the fruits of that labor are going to increase the size of Jeff's pile of money, over and above all else, even accounting for other shareholders. I remember a web article from a few years ago that displayed median income in the US and poverty level and a bunch of other commonly known fortunes as a full-page graph that you had to manually scroll through to see their size. The last entry was Bezo's and you had to go on and on and on scrolling for probably 5 minutes after the last big fortunes were done. The typical household income ranges were gone in the first blip. It just made you recon with how absurdly large the amount of money some people have amassed really is. So...should anyone get fired for not working extra hard to make more money for this organization...
Law of the jungle makes sense if it really is competing for limited food in a wild environment. If it's plunked down in the middle of a Civilization of laws and is used to justify harming others to amass more money, I think it's a load of crap. It's a way for the biggest takers to justify their excess at other people's expense.
Yes. I went from Amazon to Google and it felt like a breath of fresh air. I can’t say what’s happened since I left 10 years ago — it doesn’t sound good — but at that time, it was like night and day.
Like, there was an all-hands meeting where they announced that it was silly to continue to act like a scrappy start-up in how they paid people. Larry Page got up and said that, ethically, he didn’t feel right continuing to underpay just because people would take the job for the Google prestige — and perks didn’t make up for it. (At that time, Larry still reviewed every single technical employee’s interviews and made the final hiring decision, so it was understandable that he’d feel personally accountable.)
So, effective immediately, he increased everyone’s pay to market without regard to their seniority or performance, and sent everyone home that day with a significant cash bonus. (At the home office, envelopes of literal cash, which turned out to be a mistake when the press got wind of it before the end of the business day, they ended up needing to rent transport for everyone in the Bay Area to get home safely.)
That alone could be read as “the least you could do” or wrapping a business necessity in virtue-signaling clothing. But it was an all-hands and people could ask questions. One person got up and asked “can we also increase the employee charity match from 50% to 100%, too?” Larry, Sergey and Eric looked at each other with a “sounds good to me” expression, called on the CFO right there to ask if that was doable, and said yes. It wasn’t in the FAQ prepared for the event, so they really did make that decision right then and there.
So Google’s fall especially saddens me. It’s very reminiscent of how Sarah describes the double-haters coming to be dominant. It *wasn’t* always true that everyone was always acting purely avariciously. But given recent behavior, it doesn’t seem cynical to assert that if you weren’t there.
Your description of Jeff Bezos’ rationalism sounds eerily like Trump’s own management style, right down to the plausible deniability, in many ways with just different personalities. Did you ever become un-flummoxed by his non-answer of just chalk it up to his process of decision making? This sounds like the sort of management style if you don’t value the people and talent working for you or think them disposable at any moment.
He was very good at making everyone in a planning or tech meeting with him feel like another valued member of the team. He wasn’t prone to the Steve Jobs-esque fits of rages that would leave employees sobbing or thinking they’d been fired when he’d already forgotten they existed.
I can only guess about it, but I think these types need chaos around them, even if they must needlessly create it. “Chaos is a ladder,” for the Littlefingers of the world.
So I can’t answer your question directly, but that charisma making people feel as if he had qualities that, if anything, he had the absolute opposite of does seem very Trump-esque, doesn’t it?
What is it with us that people at the very top won’t or don’t want to take accountability for what they manage and control? Accountability these days is clearly for the little people. As a warehouse employer Amazon is not bad with good benefits for the industry and programs to train and promote those with initiative. It really isn’t a bad option in that category.
Forced ranking can work, in limited circumstances. But as an ongoing way to manage it has major limitations, like getting rid of institutional knowledge that can really help an organization navigate a low frequency but high risk event.
I don’t think one that invariably requires one or more firings in every single stack could ever “work” in the sense of being “better enough” in any metric to justify the capricious cruelty and disruption. It particularly rankled for someone like me who worked in groups like Website Engineering, where there was great selectivity and filling an empty slot was very hard.
(Just to put it concretely: I don’t know what the ratio was at Amazon, but I know for a fact that at Google the proportion of new hires to applicants across the company — notoriously tiny, more selective than any Ivy League university — was, by pure coincidence but memorably, almost exactly the same as the proportion of new technical hires to those who could be slotted into the equivalent job title. In other words, a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction. And then you *must fire* some of them a year later?!?)
The management 'style' Bezos, Musk and other lazy mangers is make insane cuts and watch the underlings scramble. See if they can take up the slack or the company can make a profit or (in the case of Musk) become a tool for 'influencing'. If so, the CEO is a genius. If not, the DEO will unobtrusively reinstate some, but the least amount possible so the underlings are working past their long-term capacity. They'll have saved money and shareholders will reward them. If the company goes under, Donald Trump shows it doesn't matter.
I don’t disagree with your overall sentiment, but it’s arithmetically impossible that moves like those “forcing-function” firings could meaningfully impact shareholder perceptions, since fully-loaded their salaries and benefits are unlikely to be even one one-hundredth of a percent of total expenses.¹ They certainly wouldn’t publicize such a firing in a press release or shareholder communication.
If they were done at the scale DOGE did, sure, but these weren’t housecleanings, these were random and capricious based on whatever happened to catch their attention. They didn’t have a “chief sacking officer” who went around and did these things across the company.
—
¹ Addendum, 16:55 EDT: It always bothers me when I throw something like that out without checking. Not to pat myself on the back *too much*, but in 2005, Amazon’s total reported costs were approx. $8B. The fully-loaded cost of a typical technical team in 2005 would have been ~$1.4M. So, ~0.0175%. So, actually, almost two hundredths of a percent, but I was definitely in the right ballpark.
I've had thoughts about the Washington Post. ( https://neoreality.substack.com/p/russian-roulette-bad-for-america ) To me it's obvious that they never would have ever dared to proclaim 'Democracy Dies in Darkness' in the first place if they had realized that it wasn't a single politician but an entire political party that had turned against the concept of democracy and towards authoritarianism. The Washington Post is not willing to intentionally alienate half the country; those are people it wants to try to get to buy its newspaper.
(It did alienate the liberal half with their authoritarian turn, but they didn't think they were doing it at the time. JVL said once that 'what people don't understand is that Fox News is as far left as it can possibly go without losing readers.' What people at the Washington Post didn't understand is that the Post was already as far right as it could possibly go without losing readers, for much the same reason.)
Now, they obviously had no intention of doing anything to prevent democracy's death in the darkness, just reminding you that you had a duty to purchase their paper, and that duty did not come with any responsibilities accruing to them. But they were willing to cloak themselves in the guardians of democracy as long as they thought that basically the entire country liked the concept of elections. Once that was revealed to no longer be the case, the Washington Post was forced to become, at best, election-agnostic.
Now it is election-opposed, but this shouldn't surprise us either. As you've said, the marginal value of money isn't that high. Sure, supporting the Democrats might give the people at the top of an extra billion or two dollars, and supporting Donald Trump might cost them ten billion dollars, but they'll still be rich.
What does Donald Trump give them that they'll never get anywhere else? Donald Trump tells them that they have no responsibilities to anyone, that they can be as cruel as they like and enjoy themselves, that morality is fake and gay, that you should be allowed to fire your employees if they won't have sex with you. That's worth way more to them than an extra billion dollars.
There is only one thing someone in a dystopia can offer someone in a utopia - the libidinous pleasure of domination. And real domination, the real thing, not just play-acting about it.
I think this saying also comes into play: "a hit dog will holler."
Trump brutalized Bezos during his first term by threatening to weaponize the federal government against Amazon and other Bezos businesses because WaPo wrote critical articles about Trump. To avoid losing billions of dollars from Trump weaponizing government against him in Trump's second term, Bezos caved.
He turned the Washington Post into the New York Post, and Bezos has bribed Trump with over a $100 million with the Melania flop movie, donations to Trump's ballroom, and Trump's various PACs and money laundering operations.
I really do appreciate your Catholic inflected pieces, even the inside baseball. Maybe I have commented this before but I grew up in the Diocese of Rapid City, SD - first when Charles Chaput was bishop and later Blase Cupich. I was at a formative age when Bishop Chaput seemed to really push politics into Church life there. I remember my Dad having a conversation with our parish priest saying he wouldn't become a Republican to stay a Catholic. Lots of tension around topics like have you committed a mortal sin if you vote for a Democrat, ect... Your writing on how politics and Catholic faith can come together has helped me unwind a lot of that kind of tension. Thank you for that!
Yeah, seems similar to what I remember. Lots of line drawing about what kind of people were or were not welcome. That's strange in Church to begin with, but doubly strange when the lines are being drawn around party politics.
We're supposed to blindly forgive the transgressions of priests preying on the vulnerable. Yet, I'm not welcome because my monogoumus wife and I would use some latex for some activities.
I can't take moral instruction from an entity with such messed up priorities.
A WONDERFUL idea. Weekly guest sholars/writers/leaders from varied faiths, including those without (Catholic turned athiest here) sharing perspectives intersecting with current state-of-the-world? I'd buy it.
I strongly suggest that people drop WAPO, Amazon Prime and Amazon streaming services and use that money to support independent journalism and the Resistance. Why give Jeff Bezos a nickel. He’s already got all the money he wants coming in through DoD contracts. (Or DOW, at least in Hegseth’s mind)
Correct. Businesses would have to kill AWS not the general population. Tech shifts. There will be a day when AWS can't pivot but in the end even if AWS died, the billionaire would survive with a minimal scratch (can't say the same for the investors)
I suspect AWS will die before businesses kill it. If Bezos doesn't do something about all the targeted attacks, businesses will start looking for something more reliable. Now, who is doing the DDOS attacks, I don't know.
I do everything I can to not buy from Amazon. My kids think I'm nuts. I just tell them I don't want any of my money going to Jeff Bezos and is weirdo wife.
Late-20th-century critiques of deregulation and wealth worship aged well because they warned that concentrated money becomes concentrated power. The Post isn’t dying from “market forces,” it’s being gutted because Bezos can ignore losses and still reshape a civic institution to fit his preferences. The point is that when owners are immune to consequences, the public loses accountability. This is what “free market” talk looks like when the market can’t discipline the billionaire.
Ashley Parker of The Atlantic has a beautiful, heartfelt, heartbreaking piece today on The Atlantic’s site about The Washington Post and her long personal and professional ties to it. I highly recommend reading it, and I believe non-subscribers can access it as long as they haven’t already hit their freebie article maximum!
It brought tears to my eyes as well ~ The tenderness with which she wrote…I wish vast numbers of people would awaken and work together to keep the uniqueness of America alive. Thank goodness for The Bulwark!
To repeat a comment from last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer is in the black. It's 100% possible for a modern newspaper to make money.
I don't agree on Bezos' motivations. I don't think he just wants to destroy things. I think he's more interested in protecting his federal contracts for computer services.
Yes, the Washington Post is dead ... dead by the deliberate hand of its owner.
I was assigned to Defense Language School East Coast (DLIEC) during the Watergate conspiracy. The Washington Post was a real, vital, and vitally important journal then and for many years afterward. It's demise is really, really sad.
Enjoyed the column. I’d make one observation. I doubt Bezos trashed then torched the Wash Post out of an enjoyment of watching the destruction. I think it is something much worse and much more telling about the failure of our elites to face this version of the Republican party.
It was nothing personal, just a business decision. The Post is by far the smallest part of Bezos’ portfolio. Both Amazon and Blue Origin are much larger, have greater current grown and the potential for large future returns. However, they are both subject to a much greater level of government regulation and the attendant ability of the government to harm their value. His immolation of the Post is nothing more than a sacrifice on the Orange God Kings bonfire of the vanities. If eliminating the Post as a viable force for independent journalism is the price of keeping the Feds out of Amazon and the FAA allowing his launch windows for Blue Origin’s satellite communication network, it makes complete economic sense for any spreadsheet jockey.
The fact that such a man, showered with riches by his success at innovation aided and facilitated by our countries investments in education, infrastructure, rule of law, free flow of capital & labor and government paid for R&D, is willing to make such a business decision in search of more wealth and power piled on top of his hoard shows his utter lack of principle, honor or decency. Characteristic that seem to be shared by all of our elites who we see daily making the same “business decisions”. They are morally corrupt.
I remember that last year someone was putting together a consortium of investors to buy the paper. At that time I commented on WAPO that Linda French and Mackenzie Scott buy the paper and run it themselves. Bezos won’t sell. Yes, it is small potatoes to him, but he would have to agree that he failed. He won’t admit that.
I'm really coming around to Bernie's argument that every billionaire represents a policy failure. I also hope that there is some form of consequence imposed upon these billionaires when this regime falls. Their companies should be broken up, they should pay much higher taxes, and ideally, shunned from all polite society. Alas, I'm probably hoping for too much.
They need to be taxed out of existence. I am convinced at this point that achieving billionaire status is not indicative of success, intelligence, or merit, but rather it is indicative of a severely flawed character. It is indicative of obscene greed. It is indicative of a hole in the soul where philanthropy, charity, and patriotism should be. It is indicative of disregard for duty to one's employees, community, and society.
Agreed. My wife and I were discussing this. There is some number of dollars - I'm guessing tens of millions, but I'm willing to debate - that a person can work hard and earn without hurting anyone else. But beyond some point, you literally have to hurt others to make more than that. Legally destroy your competitors, stifle innovation and competition, screw over your own employees to increase profits, etc.
Large amounts of money require you to be a sociopath to get there. Extremely large amounts of money breed extreme sociopaths.
I like this way of framing the issue. I've known small business owners that have built nice companies worth 10s of millions. They didn't hurt anyone, usually very involved in community efforts, spent locally, etc. I don't ever want to see these people as villains. But at some point beyond this, it gets gross.
The conversation you are having with your wife is an interesting one. Each billionaire has a choice, and there is quite a contrast between how Jeff Bezos seems to be using his wealth and how Mackenzie Scott (Jeff's ex-wife) is using hers. If Wikipedia is accurate, she has donated $26.3 billion to over 1,600 charities as of December 2025.
FYI - if you talk with anyone in the nonprofit space who has applied for Mackenzie Scott's grants, they have an extremely robust and well vetted system to make sure her money is having a positive impact. She's doing a lot of good.
It kind of boggles the mind how much better many of the billionaires could be doing for the society that produced them. They could become famous, historically remembered, for great works of philanthropy, or fostering the arts, or advancing research... and yet... they only seem to spend on domination and control, or "keeping up with the Joneses" style competition with other billionaire chuds.
The two charities in my community that got grants from Scott are fastidiously run, effective, and expanding strategically with their new money
And Melinda Gates is another good example, donating much her money to caues focused on women’s rights, reproductive health, and global gender equity.
I take nothing away from Mackenzie Scott or Melinda Gates. They are true philanthropists. However, there is an argument to be made that they should pay taxes instead because, theoretically at least, we all have a say in how tax money is spent for the good of society. Why should billionaires be allowed to define the agenda?
I don’t doubt that they would have happily paid higher taxes, had that been the rule, or would in the future. Because it wasn’t in the tax structure, they are giving it away.
She wasn’t the one either the greed gene. I’m sure she was a part of the business at some point (in the 10s millions), she has not been a part in years.
I would counter with Warren Buffet as an example of someone seemingly not corrupted by vast wealth, or Bezos ex who is using her billions for constructive philanthropy. Throw in Kristy Noem as a non billionaire who seems to fit your description of a destructive sociopath who thrives on hurting others, including her pets. Net worth doesn't define the issue....but the destructive capability of the corrupt individual is massively exacerbated by wealth and a position of power.
Buffet is a unique creature. His kids have enough so he's just giving it away. Love this. Pritzker is also unique.
He strikes me as being from a different era, with a certain sense of noblesse oblige. He also seems to acknowledge that his wealth is somewhat of a right-place-right-time phenomenon, without being self deprecating about it.
That really gives Pritzker a leg-up in the primary.
I wonder about Mark Cuban, too. His Cost Plus Drugs is saving millions of people money, including me. I don’t know much about him otherwise.
I had a moment years ago where I realized that very rich people only care about money and that's why they're rich and the rest of us just want a comfortable life and our kids to be okay.
Hard to imagine that there aren't some poor and middle-class people who only care about money. It was noted by other commenters here that billionaires rely considerably on luck to get where they are. That implies there are some that want to be billionaires (ie, only care about money) but are simply unlucky.
Your comment is quite thought-provoking, Eric, and I appreciate the respectful counters, where others have offered positive examples of a few who are "good billionaires".
I would love to see the Bulwark produce a podcast on the topic. Perhaps they could get Pritzker to join a discussion about the debatable value, and the moral responsibilities, of billionaires?
I would really like to see that.
With a rebuttal from muskrat. 🙄
I've heard the suggestion that the limit ought to be $100 million (adjusted for inflation in the future). And to me that makes sense; that's enough that a person could withdraw about $4 million/year (before taxes) without ever running out of money. That certainly allows for a lavish lifestyle, but it's not enough to buy the federal government.
Whatever the limit is, it's not anything close to a billion, that's for sure!
I think the motivation to amass an enormous amount of wealth, beyond what anyone could possibly need, is social status. The old they-want-to-be-in-the-room-where-it-happens drive. The amount of the wealth is your ticket into those rooms.
This is my perspective exactly. I don't know the dollar amount, but it exists, and it is less than a billion.
👍👍🌊
I have to say, though, that part of the reason they managed to *become* billionaires is because they are often psychopathic personalities. It's well known in psych circles that kids who exhibit the dark triad traits (Psychopathy, Narcissism, & Machiavellianism) will usually become either a CEO or a serial killer. They're just different sides of the same coin. This doesn't EXCUSE the hole in their soul that you bring up - it simply explains that it is often HOW they are able to be so horrid as to disregard their duty to their fellow man, writ large.
Which is why government must manage them. Psychopaths are not good for society.
“ It's well known in psych circles that kids who exhibit the dark triad traits (Psychopathy, Narcissism, & Machiavellianism) will usually become either a CEO or a serial killer” Or maybe both?
If billionaires and psychopaths are different sides of the same coin, then maybe they shouldn’t be treated like psychopaths and locked up!
It's amazing how many more philanthropic activities and spending is done by their now divorced first wives. You know, the ones who stood by them when they weren't billionaires.
Surely there is some merit. Amazon is surely useful. SpaceX dominates the launch industry for a really good reason: their rockets are the cheapest. The problem is that the wealth is not shared evenly. And, by the way, capitalism works way better than communism, even for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Let's fix it.
I'm speaking of merit in the individual, not the companies or products they create. There are countless people in the world who have just as much merit as Bezos or more, but where the billionaire sees personal merit, I see a lot of luck, and they're loath to acknowledge the role luck plays, because then that brings into question whether they deserve their status. And I will not concede that anyone deserves to have as much as Jeff Bezos has, no matter how much personal merit they have. Everyone of us stands on the shoulders of those who came before us, enjoys the protections of a well-functioning society necessary for stability, predictability, and opportunity, and these are the realities billionaires refuse to respect and refuse to give back to.
I would also suggest that Jeff Bezos would be perfectly fine if he was unable to accumulate wealth at the rate he does.
We should strongly consider the actual opportunity cost that concentration of wealth creates. Jeff Bezos has so much money that he is slowing down the economy in probably measurable ways.
Amazon has about 1.6 million employees. Jeff Bezos has 250 billion dollars. The average rate of return of the stock market is about 8%.
Jeff Bezos will get 20 billion dollars richer next year for doing nothing.
Lets say you capped his wealth at the current level and gave that 20 billion to the 1.6 million people who work for Amazon. Each Amazon employee would get $12,500 dollar in additional income!
When people talk about to much money, this it.
Yeah. Amazon is a great example of luck as they could have easily folded during the dot com bust like so many others but they survived
Sure, luck has a role in billionaires' success but that's true for everyone regardless of income level. To place luck over hard work gets silly people to buy lottery tickets instead of applying themselves. Although the billionaires are certainly not blameless, their role in our capitalist system is to maximize their income while playing by the rules. In general, the problem is the rules don't work.
Where is this rule about maximizing income? The American capitalist economy persevered for well over one hundred years before Jack Welch came along and turned things on their head by declaring that he had no duty other than to maximize shareholder profits, and he became the corporate pied piper that all the other CEOs followed along.
My gut says it comes down to personality trait differences. The Gordon Gecko “greed is good” crowd see “human capital” where you and I see actual humans.
Not a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt, but his book, “The Righteous Mind” Why good people are divided by politics and religion from 2012 is really good in explaining differences like these.
Actually I think it was Milton Friedman and the 'Chicago School' who declared it. Welch was just the first to put it into practice at scale.
If I knew where the execrable welch was planted I would- - - - on the plot.
That attitude predates Welch by centuries, if not millennia.
Right the rules need reform .
"Outliers" Malcolm Gladwell would interest you if you haven't read it.
That one I haven't read, but I did somewhat recently finish Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns, and apparently it left its mark on me.
Outliers is in no way political. It's about how no one reaches certain heights without help: circumstances, timing, sheer luck and so on.
100 years ago (no www) Bezos (Musk, Zuck etc.) still would've thought he knew it all, you just wouldn't have known him.
Apparently, that book is about the problems of neoliberal capitalism. I really enjoyed this book, "The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era" by historian Gary Gerstle. He says the Neoliberal order ended with the '08 Crash and that the order that will follow will be states intervening in markets to address questions of "economic security, opportunity, and welfare . . . Beneath some of the hubbub of American politics, a new political economy along these lines is indeed taking shape" (https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/cafe-econ-a-new-political-order-emerges).
Our capitalism is out of control. I think the average European has a much better life than the average American.
Agreed. Europeans have a better take on a lot of things but, even if we could get Americans to recognize it, they wouldn't want to copy them. Sigh.
Agree. Too many Americans want their guns and their religion.
And their Fox angertainment.
Amazon may be "useful," but it exists as it is now only by having wiped out how many thousands of small businesses. Can we count that as negative utility to set against any putative (and I think they are largely putative) benefits or cost savings?
The Walmart Effects aren't just about Walmart.
Or jobs lost from the businesses gobbled up to offset against those "created" by the Amazons.
Amazon was useful and innovative when they started - now it's a different story - the enshitification of Amazon is what happens when they become that big and the customers have less choice.
SpaceX is an a similar trajectory especially now that musk is basically syphoning off all of the money the SpaceX makes in order to fund robots or whatever. You see that in Falcon 9 has 2 failures out of 605 and the Starship has 5 failures out of 11. Maybe Starship is "newer" but it's still an almost 50% failure rate.
Every new rocket starts with failures. As they say in the industry, "space is hard." Starship's failures are about what everyone expected. It is worthwhile comparing its history to that of NASA's SLS. Its rockets cost so much that they can't launch them often enough to get the bugs out and, by the time they do, their technology is obsolete. Starship is doing things the right way and SLS is not.
The nature of the space industry has changed. The reality is that, initially, there was not enough profitability in space to justify the massive investment and risk required. I am not sure that there is, even now, tbh (not without governments basically still footing the bill).
So it makes sense that the initial space industry was essentially government run, with government goals, using government practices.
It makes less sense now, but the field is still very narrow because you either need strong government subsidy or be ludicrously rich yourself to go into the business.
High bar to entry.
SLS has 6 different configurations, 2 of which are manned. Starship has 3 configurations, one of which is manned and not developed yet. Starship still has 50% failure rate which people seem to tolerate with Musk but won't tolerate with other companies (Boeing, ULA, Rocketdyne, Northrup-Grumman) NASA and the stock market would declare the end of the world for other companies.
Six configurations is very expensive (and does lead to the question of why?). Blowing up rockets because "learning" is very expensive. Manned missions don't have the risk tolerance for "learning"
With Musk sucking all the money out of SpaceX to fund robots, etc. He will cut costs at SpaceX, which will lead to more failures. This is mostly a function of Musk's ego and the next new shiny thing (robots vs. a functioning rocket company) Hence SpaceX will follow the path of enshitification but with tax payer money
Starlink, another good Musk idea, is the biggest current source of cash flowing into SpaceX’s business operations and it is growing larger every year. Musk can justify Starship as a Starlink satellite launcher alone.
As for Musk crapping on SpaceX, we can't rule it out. Still, SpaceX is very tied into NASA and the larger space community and they will not let SpaceX do anything crazy as they depend on it. SpaceX's development process is more open than its competitors and, therefore, gets more scrutiny. I doubt very much they would risk their success by cutting costs too much. After all, they are already the cheapest option by far. As it has been pointed out many times lately, their scale is the biggest reason for their safety. Launching frequently ensures that the bugs are caught. SpaceX had many more launches of Falcon 9 before sending people on it than competing rockets. Look at the failure of Boeing's manned capsule for comparison.
Debbie, you seem to know a lot about SpaceX. Every time I see a launch has ended in rapid unscheduled disassembly, which honestly seems like every launch at this point, I think about how much money just went up in flames for a private company. It's gotta be tens of billions at least. Do you know where this seemingly inexhaustible supply of funding is coming from?
Less choice but low prices. I think most Americans prefer the latter.
It's going to take a wee bit of socialism to fix laissez faire capitalism. I never wanted to live in the Soviet union or red China either . It would be icky to share my tooth brush with the entire village.
A dollop of socialism to repair capitalism. I like it. I can live with that.
Yes, a bit of socialism is what's needed. Those who try to make "socialism" into the enemy are evil.
I guess that they don't accept their social security checks. 🙄🌊
I agree, but there can be a counterbalance in the forms of anti-trust and other regulation, as well as a significantly redistributive system. That was our system from basically the post-war years to the Reagan years, and many American companies thrived.
Yes. Government creates the playing field on which capitalists compete. It should work like the NFL which tweaks the rules yearly in order to make competition safe and fair while maximizing its entertainment value.
That's a great point. One problem is that politicians (and voters) never like to spend the money to evaluate programs adequately. And another is that there's no political incentive to admit that changes are needed in a program--it just creates a vulnerability that the other side can exploit.
A perfect analogy. Like any competition, the game of capitalism needs clear, fair rules and umpires to enforce them!
You make an excellent point! In general I have come to believe that capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others. We have moved away from mores that once held corporations responsible to their employees and to the communities where they operate, which made capitalism a bit more virtuous. IMO, changes to tax policy and labor laws during the Reagan era —and following— played a major role here.
Paying a living wage should return to being the responsibility of the corporation and its customers, rather than externalized to the general taxpayer, whether that taxpayer buys products/services from the corporation or not.
If Congress were not wholly owned by corporate donors, it would be easier to change anti-trust law and tax policy to mitigate the worst harms of capitalism.
Regulated capitalism works. Unfettered capitalism does not and ultimately leads to slaves—indentured servants—and owners.
Serf city here we come......
I agree completely.
Unfortunately, too many Americans admire these people and want to be rich like them. it is the height of selfishness.
For this I blame Ronald Reagan and all who elevated and championed him and his absurd policies like "trickle down economics" which only made the rich wealthier and more influential. I don't want to hear about the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Important? Yes. But the cost of this kind of leadership to our nation and most of us has been devastating.
Well said, Don.
Uh oh Sandy are you on Jimmys side ? We can put on our red berets and redistribute the ill gotten gains of our billionaire overlords ! Sing our new national anthem with me !
" this land is your land, this land is my land....... " .
Almost every billionaire started out filthy rich, with a massive inheritance. There are exceptions; Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, but they are quite few and far between, and even in those three examples, the only one who started out with nothing is Soros.
Trump inherited the equivalent of $1bil in today's money. Musk's father owns an emerald mine in SA, along with massive RE holdings. Even the ones who didn't grow up in the midst of obscene wealth mostly grew up in white, exceedingly priveleged circumstances. The pretense of merit and the self-made man (it's usually men) is mostly a self-serving myth.
I think you nailed it, Don Gates. Being a billionaire is indicative of obscene greed.
Agreed. The more I learn about the really rich, and even the pretty rich, the more I realize that the only difference between them and your accountant or dentist is not intelligence or hard work, but a willingness to cheat and dumb luck.
Even the best entrepreneurial tens-of-millionaires I know, while providing value in their industry, also had a shifty side that accounted for a lot of their success.
Ironically, it's the billionaire I know who is an angel. But he was born to both sides of that equation.
Agreed!
Too many billionaires actin’ like villainaires
Is that a line from a song? If not, it should be.
Nope. I just reckon all those years of listening to ol’ Bobby Dylan are finally starting to pay off.
They're selling postcards of the hanging...... My favorite song of all time.
They apparently really get off on that.
I may have to lift that one! Too good to pass up.
The ultra rich used feel a moral obligation, or had practical logistical reasons, to put at least *some* of their wealth back into the local community, whether because they wanted their vacation resort in St. Augustine to have people who lived there to staff it (Rockefeller) or they wanted an educated workforce (Carnegie's libraries), etc.
Today's billionaires are citizens of the globe, hoarding all their wealth and giving back nothing. If they're not going to even do the bare minimum voluntarily, they must be forced to.
Weirdly, I've seen Trump-boosters make a similar argument about the good old benevolent plutocrats vs. the bad rich "elites" of today -- and then argue that Trump's "populism" was the antidote.
Of course, they don't expect Trump to be personally generous, nor do they criticize the self-dealing of his plutocratic supporters. For some, the "populist" shtick was only about culture wars. For others, it was pure cynicism.
Remember the quaint noblesse oblige ?
I recall reading that while Carnegie was putting lots of money into libraries, he didn't want to raise the pay of his workers because he believed they would spend the money unwisely.
Bernie might be right but our reaction should be to fix the policies rather than eliminate billionaires. The call to eliminate billionaires is like trying to fix gas leaks in the mines by killing canaries. We should allow for success but recognize that others contribute to that success. We do have mechanisms for that now (taxes, investing in stock, profit-sharing, employee stock options) but they just don't work very well.
In Scanidanavia they say in response to questions about taxation that you don't want to be a rich man in a poor country. Too much torch and pitchfork exposure.
They literally find it vulgar to amass that much wealth.
Another cultural difference. The others are guns and religion. Those are connected, I think.
Yeah you're right about that, I used to have an osteopath who told me ,
" everything is connected Jim " .
Yes, while in Norway we were told that the wealthy live quite modestly (homes), otherwise the Norwegian tax authorities would start digging around.
Agree the focus should be on the policy choices that have enabled the enormous wealth concentration of the last few decades, not the billionaires themselves. Certainly that includes tax policy as well as deregulation and antitrust enforcement. The Dems should be running on economic policy choices that strengthen the middle class over the wealthy. They will if the voters have their back.
Yeah, I I learned way back in junior high school how destructive trusts and monopolies are.
Unfortunately, the people who try to fix the policies are the ones given the money from the billionaires.
When the rich really got out of their skis the French and Bolshevik Revolutions happened. Both were extremely violent to even their footsoldiers and the latter gave us communism which ironically MAGA wants to copy parts of it (the worship of Dear Leader and suppression of civil liberties parts).
Basically our billionaires who've abandoned all pretext of not being the moustache twirling caricatures of billionaires should keep that in mind....
I’ll bet we can find a whole cadre of volunteers to play the role of Madame Defarge. My hand is up.
It's also an excellent reason to impose very significant inheritance taxes. If anything, inheritors of great fortune are even worse.
It used to be called the "Estate Tax", and everyone was fine with it. Then the Republicans re-named it a "Death Tax" and suddenly everyone wanted it gone, including people who would only inherit sums MUCH lower than the tax threshold.
You probably are hoping for too much even though, at this point, most billionaires pose an existential threat to our democracy.
Edit: a million dollars is less than a 1,000 dollars to normal people. Sooo bizarre how everyone runs to speak up for her— when she doesn’t for herself. She’s gone MAGA coded as in— she hasn’t said anything about ICE using her music.
Same. Turns out there is no benevolent billionaire. What’s Ms Swift doing with her money?
Only embarrassing herself.
Taylor Swift is a major philanthropist, donating at least $6.5 million in 2025 alone to disaster relief, food banks, and health causes. Major 2025 donations include $5 million to Feeding America for hurricane relief, $1 million to the American Heart Association, and $1 million to various Nashville-based nonprofits.
She also quietly donates big money to food banks in every city she tours in. And she treats her staff exceptionally well - not just those on stage w her, but all the way down the line, handing out bonuses that came to about $200M out of her own pocket. Really confused why she was singled out and also the "embarrasses herself" line. Like, how? I feel as though I am taking crazy pills having read that comment.
EVERYTHING she donated in tour cities (mostly to food banks and children's hospitals) was done quietly. The recipients talked about the donations, NOT Ms. Swift OR her team. During COVID lockdown, she paid a fan's rent so she didn't get evicted. Right after the tour ended, she visited sick children in her adopted home of Kansas City & sent a little girl there an exact, correctly-sized replica of the designer outfit she'd worn because the girl loved fashion & the otufit so much. Before COVID, she used to invite a group of fans to her own home to have a listening party with her right before an album dropped. The woman KNOWS where she came from and WHO keeps her at the top. She also pays very well AND provides health insurance to all of her people (band, dancers, back-up singers, etc), which is unheard-of in the music business from what I understand. Would that I was so embarrassing a human.
Only when her publicist can leak that info. She doesn’t care. She maybe did once— not now. Money rots people. Sure she “takes care of her people” I guess—but that’s not THAT unusual for successful artists.
How do you know this? Sources, please.
Agree.
Well put, Jennifer. Hope Allison responds.
a million dollars is less than 1,000.
Thank you for this--T-Swizzle is on the side of the angels with regard to this stuff.
Also, Swift did not amass her billions by suppressing others, or stifling "competition", or using her power to manipulating prices/venues. Not sure why Swift is introduced here.....
Agee, Stephanie.
What?? She has done all of that? She just did that to Harry Styles— like this month?
Not to mention she was incredibly generous to those who played a part in making her last tour such a success.
1 million dollars is less than 1,000 dollars. And then she writes it all off.
Thx for the facts.
From Google AI.
A million dollars is less than 1,000 dollars to normal people. She also — just partnered with— Disney — for what? Money money money money money— all the releasing of her music to block other artists? Bb grow up -we are almost 40.
She writes everything off. She is the richest, most successful artist in history— but can’t find the time to tell the administration to fuck off for using her music for torture porn?
I don’t buy it. Every other artist has.
She has enough money to make lasting change. Doesn’t even have to be political, food banks certainly shouldn’t be— but call me when Taylor donates like 100 million. She wouldn’t even notice.
Sadly, she’s like the rest of these cowards. She can’t stand to be on the outs. She needed to go MAGA coded to stay on top.
This gives me no pleasure. Folklore makes me cry. I don’t want to tear down a successful woman, certainly not a person who is a musician—but being a “feminist billionaire” who donates a few million here or there is not a flex— let’s be real — she’s tossing pennies in a pond, whilst yawning.
What happened to the Tay of 2020?
Releasing her music blocks other artists?
Not sure where this dismissal of Taylor Swift comes from, but from everything I've read and heard about her, unlike the techbros, she doesn't think she's a god.
I'm not a swiftie but have come to admire her. And she has worked for everything she has.
MAGA coded> Why because you think she's endorsing the tradwife lifestyle because of some of her latest looks and that she is engaged, loves her fiance, and wants to have kids? Since when does that make someone anti-feminist? Trump and the right wing loons have attacked her and she has stood up to them. She endorsed Harris and encouraged her fans to register and vote.
And of course you dismiss what we know of her charity as "told by her publicist." Damned if she does, damned if she doesn't.
What do you want from her? To renounce her career, give away all her money, wear a hairshirt, and attack men?
Letting her music be used for the ice videos? That is MAGA coded.
The last few years she has only stayed on top because she milks her fans for every penny. She releases the same song over and over to manipulate the charts.
Come on. She hasn’t always behaved like this, she used to go hard at Trump.
The publicist thing isn’t unusual—and I’m writing off the charity donation —JUST LIKE SHE DOES.
She could do real shit, for her country— She chooses not to.
Eh, I think Taylor is fine as far as billionaires go. She seems to respect others, contributes a lot more to charitable and social causes than most people in her position, and does individual volunteer work as well with sick kids. I've never seen Elon Musk talk to a sick kid in a hospital, as an example.
Is she my hero? No. Should billionaires exist? No. We agree on that. But, if we are to suffer billionaires for now, would it be nice if more of them were like Swift than like Bezos or Musk? I think so.
The $100M mark you offered is interesting, since she's specifically not flashy about her giving, it's hard to pin exactly how much she's given but most estimates are in the 10s of millions. There's plenty of documented donations in the $1M - $6M dollar range, which you string 20 of those together over the length of her career, and she's already hit the benchmark you set out (ex: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/much-taylor-swift-donated-trends-124431814.html, https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/taylor-swift-gives-2-million-various-charities-holiday-donation-spree-rcna250812). It's well over that if you want to consider the bonuses she paid to staff, that was like $200M, but I suppose we shouldn't if we're strictly focused on charitable giving.
I personally don't see the 'MAGA coded' thing, either implicitly or explicitly. She endorsed Harris, Trump's opponent, and put out an anti-Trump diss-tract on Lover in 2019. She's perennially surrounded by members of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color, in a way that does not match the white supremacist "central casting" of MAGA. I've never heard her once express any America First viewpoints - let me know if you've seen her calling for mass deportations or territorial conquest. Could she do more to disavow Trump? Maybe. I'll take her advocating for gay rights and supporting Democrats though without much fuss on my end.
As far as Folklore/Evermore, I've talked to swift fans who really liked that sound but seem subsequently disappointed with everything else. That to me is fairly normal and not unique to Swift. I love 90s Green Day better than 00s and 10s Green Day. Favorite Worst Nightmare by Arctic Monkeys is better than Humbug or Suck It and See or their later works. But if I want that sound I can just listen to those albums again. Funnily enough, the people who seem to love The Life of a Showgirl have been dudes like me. Actually Romantic struck a Weezer-stan nerve in my body, and if Swift reignites interest in todays youth in 90s alt rock I am so here for that revival.
Letting them use her music is MAGA coded and unforgivable for me.
Did she let them or did they just appropriate the music, the way they have with the Rolling Stones, etc.?
I don’t listen to Taylor Swift, and I agree with the broader point that there’s no such thing as a truly benevolent billionaire under capitalism. But I’m not sure “embarrassing herself” quite fits here.
From what I can see, she does at least make a point of paying her staff well and sharing a significant amount of her tour income with the people who make it possible, as well as donating to charities in the places she visits. That doesn’t make her a hero or absolve the system that enables extreme wealth, but it does materially benefit workers and communities.
For me, the more productive critique is about the structures that allow this level of wealth accumulation in the first place, rather than personal ridicule. There’s room to hold both ideas at once.
There's two things going on here.
1. As best I can tell, Ms. Swift does more than most people in her situation. In my book that is worth something.
2. The system that allows that much wealth accumulation is bad, regardless of how charitable some individuals are.
She hasn’t even bothered to say anything about them using her music.
As far as embarrassing herself — on the same week of the Epstein files, us attacking the rest of the world, what has she been up to? Releasing the same shitty music to bloc younger artists.
Yes, Pattie! It's the structures - tax policy, deregulation and mergers. You know, the rigged system.
It's hard for people to grasp systems and easy to demonize those who benefit from it. If Bulwark subscribers fail to see the structures, getting a majority of the electorate who don't benefit from the system to see them is gonna take a lot of work - educating, messaging and messengers. Bernie's got the right message, but he's not the messenger for reaching the vast middle. That's why he lost the Democratic presidential primary. Twice.
I’ve been a Bernie fan for years and years, and I think his primary losses for many, came because of his age. There was once some idea that at a reasonable age, people retired. They got old. For some reason, our elected officials do not want to retire. That’s a shame because they do little in their last years. Bernie is the exception. So are others. But you should not put them into the pressure cooker of the Presidency. I supported Joe Biden when he said he would be the bridge president, only one term. With one of the best administrations, he left vilified. And this current fool? Can’t even try to say how bad he is.
Of course the structure is awful— THAT TAYLOR IS A PART OF. She helps hold this system in place. She puts her neck out there for nothing. Not since 2020 anyway.
Yes! She "donates" only as much as she can make in a few days of compound interest. Not enough to dent anything really.
THANK YOU, BRYAN. Jesus— the way people run to defend her!
The structures that allow , you got it , they made the rules for the game they play.
Bill Gates certainly did a lot of good with his billions but I guess he now has Epstein problems. Perhaps your slogan should be "no billionaire is benevolent all the time".
Good point. Thanks for fighting malaria but no thanks for raping children. Talk about a mixed bag.
A lot of the criticisms of billionaires are valid. Bezos' wedding is Exhibit "A". One of the most grotesque displays of wealth in history. It's a slippery slope, however, to place your idea of whether what someone else is contributing, charitably, is enough. Sorry, but not your call.
You don’t think her level of wealth is also grotesque?
I used to work for a billionaire (definitely earned his money through a lifetime of work and employed thousands of people), but his wife would fly on their jet to have lunch with Oprah and then fly home after. This is the shit that they all do now and it doesn't benefit anyone (pollution being one major thing).
All of them could do more. I look to the ex-wives of Gates and Bezos for the model behaviors. TayTay does some stuff, but agree that she could also do more.
Oh, absolutely. Years ago I just thought the "policy failure" line was just a catchy slogan. And maybe that's its genesis, depending on when Bernie started saying it.
But these guys have the power of huge NGOs, and wield it capriciously and vindictively. That's a threat to civic stability.
It may be apocryphal, but there's a story that FDR, when signing a New Deal-era bill with a huge tax increase on the highest earners, proclaimed, "This one's for Hearst!"
I want that level of animosity from a post-MAGA president toward our oligarchs. Why shouldn't the leaders we favor want to rein in . . . or, I'll say it: punish . . . Musk? HE WANTS TO HURT YOU AND REGULARLY SAYS SO.
Want the trappings of American citizenship and commerce? Pay up. Or go somewhere that'll put up with your bullshit.
Honestly, my ultimate goal with Musk in particular is that he (stupidly) chooses to live in Russia or China. Have fun with THAT freedom, dude.
I think you can also make national security and public safety arguments for both a maximum income and a maximum net worth. I don't know what the exact numbers should be but there do need to be maximums.
Individuals who have enough money to afford their own intelligence organizations and police forces clearly have far too much money and are a threat to the security and safety of everyone else.
My thought is that anything that gets big enough to be an existential threat to be united states can be taken down as a preventive measure by the united states. Another words we the people have the right of self defense. Buy whatever means necessary.
Worker owned media. Imagine writers and editors and journalists and media specialists all own part of the company. Wild idea. Marxism 101
We prefer to call worker-owned enterprises coops. 😉
Yes I am a Marxist I understand the concept very well lol. I'm using plain non-leftist language intentionally.
I've been on the Bernie bandwagon for a very long time. Set the top tax rate at 90% again, just like it was in the '50s, the time that MAGA wants to return to (albeit for very different reasons). We put ppl on the Moon, created the middle class, and had the best economy in the history of the world at the time. Now we just have a bunch of greedy fucks who only want more, the consequences to the rest of us be damned.
Know what would happen if we taxed the richest people in the world at a much MUCH higher rate? They'd still be the richest people in the world.
I forget who said it, and it's obviously anecdotal, but someone said that, having been around a lot of very wealthy people, it seems that they lose their grip on reality around $300mil net worth. Take that FWIW.
what would be an acceptable boundary then? Is $999 mln ok? Is 100mln too much? how about $99mln? or $9mln?
Make it a very high threshold. If Bezos/Musk/et al paid the same tax rate as a teacher, that would bring quite a lot.
The money has become irrelevant. Now they're just trying to one-up each other. Elon just wants to be the first get to the four-commas level and that's it.
i just don’t think the actual amount of someone’s wealth is a problem. or even the massive gap in wealth between different members of the society is. as long as the same rules are applied to everyone equally, i don’t see why it’s necessarily wrong or immoral to be a billionaire. i also don’t think that philanthropy is required from billionaires. on the contrary charity seems to be a hack to fix failures of a disfunctional state and society. a functioning state would use the collected taxes to cover what now is being paid for by charities. as for the concrete case of WaPo, well, it’s unfortunate that its fate is decided by a single amoral rich person, but if people feel really strong about it, nothing seems to prevent them from organizing, chipping in and buying the newspaper out. Ultimately destruction of a single newspaper can’t be detrimental to such a “strong”, “healthy”, and “long-lasting” democracy as the United States are…
The amount of money IS a problem, when it becomes so great that the rich person can essentially buy the government (which is what Musk did in the last election).
i also think that 5 corrupt (or motivated by wrong partisanship) supreme judges are a much worse problem than any number of billionaires. if not the judges themselves then definitely is the system that allows 5 individuals to throw out all balances and constraints on the executive power of the state. and by the way you don’t need billions to buy these judges. probably a motivated group of not too affluent people could chip in a few millions to pocket one or two supreme judges.
the amount is a problem because the gvt can be bought. by the same measure it could be bought by a foreign state, which is essentially what Putin does. He owns Russia (more or less single-handedly) and can use the money to buy foreign governments if they’re up for sale. So again if money can afford a single amoral person to wreak havoc in a long-standing democracy, something is wrong with the 77mln dimwits and not with the money.
Even if you don't think every billionaire is a policy failure, I do think it is completely fair to say that unless and until every kid is fed and housed in this country, that most people are able to see their doctor, and when general want is addressed such that we can focus on secondary and tertiary endeavors, yeah, the stratification is pants-on-head bananas.
I'm in Seattle. We used to have Bezos and Gates here as dueling richest people in the world until Musk entered the chat and he and Bezos could fight over having literal rockets in their backyard. Meanwhile we're means testing poor folks for oatmeal. Like, what?
"Make Billionaires Millionaires"
I found it ironic to ask WWJD in a situation where DHS has likely detained several men actually-factually named Jesus
From video linked in yesterday's comments. WWJD - Who Would Jesus Deport? Would Jesus of Nazareth deport Jesus from MLPS?
The first name of one of the two men who shot Alex Pretti was “Jesus (Ochoa)”. The other guy was “Raymundo Gutierrez”. Convict them of homicide, revoke their citizenship, and deport them, say, to Venezuela? ICE out.
Deport their corpses after they serve life terms without parole in state prison.
Hah!
Yea, but they were brown /s
So was the “original” JESUS.
If Christ were to return to this situation I have no doubt he would be killed as an imposter by the Christian nationalists.
One of the ICE agents who allegedly killed Alex Pretti is named Jesus. (Irony is dead.)
The dramatic irony…far too much.
The death of The Washington Post is one of those stories that I really need to moderate myself with because if I don’t, I will become wildly angry about something I can't change. I mean, Ferris Bueller showed better care for Cameron's dad's car than Bezos did with this institution.
As mentioned in the piece, this isn't about the macro business environment. Look at what The New York Times reported today: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2026/02/Q4-2025-Earnings-Release.pdf
Or how The Atlantic is doing: https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2024/03/atlantic-tops-1-million-subscriptions-and-profitability/677905/
Speaking of The Atlantic, would you all grant me permission to be petty (and maybe even preachy) for a moment?
Look at Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and what they are doing with their money.
Now look at Laurene Powell Jobs, Melinda French Gates, and MacKenzie Scott. These women know what to do with money. They understand that power is responsibility, and they wield it like a saber. They make these boy billionaires look like sad chumps. And you won't find them hanging out with Epstein.
I just want to compliment you on this phrase: "I mean, Ferris Bueller showed better care for Cameron's dad's car than Bezos did with this institution."
Your entire post is great, but I really love that phrase.
But plenty of rich women did
So the paper that once proudly proclaimed, "Democracy Dies in Darkness," is now increasingly spreading darkness even as it goes down the drain. The main Bezos legacy will not be that he was a billionaire, an entrepreneur, an innovator or anything else positive. It's that he was a coward and an amazingly greedy sell-out who sold his soul, if he ever had one, just so he could make more money than he or anyone could ever need. What a shameful record to leave behind.
Why can’t somebody start an alternative to Amazon??? a blue Amazon with well paid Teamster drivers and safe warehouses…
It’s probably not cost-effective. Seriously. Even now, Amazon makes more money (profit ) off web services than retail.
And gouges it’s vendors.
Never thought I would say this, but Walmart. Not perfect by any means, but seems to be an improvement. I've been surprised to find that nothing I've needed from Amazon (and I buy a lot of hard-to-find items) hasn't been available there. I'm currently trying to see how long I can go without having to order anything from Amazon, it's been a couple weeks, so it's at least not worth having Prime anymore.
Very unfortunately Amazon gives me access to someone who sells items I can no longer find anywhere. A weird light bulb in a weird appliance. A doohickey essential to make something keep working. Regular stores - even an electrical supply store- no longer carry these things, probably because Amazon does. Vicious cycle.
It's fascinating how our choices are framed these days. Walmart, target, Amazon. I was looking for a decent humidifier with certain specs in mind and ended up buying from Amazon for the first time in about half a year or so. It was slightly painful, but with sickness and family members having respiratory issues at home, it was a moment of perceived necessity. But another curiosity is what level of inconvenience I allow for myself.
Dunno. Such are the times in which we live.
Thanks for mentioning this. I've occasionally turned to Walmart, but haven't considered it a real alternative because...well, it's Walmart, and I've assumed it's just as bad. But what with each new Bezos cave to Trump (eg, the Melania movie), I'm reconsidering - at least for situations in which going other routes other than A and W seems really tough or impossible.
Does anyone still get 2-day delivery from Amazon? I don't see it lasting much longer myself, but I've become a pessimist. Anyway, their deliveries are getting less and less reliable.
Varies for me. I get prescription stuff the next day for the most part. That does not hurt my feelings. I think if they sub let stuff like clothing to a third party, there are delays
For a lot of reasons, but largely because Amazon has "most favored nation" status with anyone who sells on their platform. They're not allowed to sell their products for cheaper anywhere else, even on their own websites. So any Amazon competitor is selling things for more money right off the bump.
Yes, I’m not assuming that a competitor could sell for cheaper than Amazon. I’m assuming that the anti-Trump forces in this country would switched to supporting the competitor.
The alternative exists. Unfortunately it’s Walmart.
It's actually Google and Microsoft.
Woe!
https://x.com/keitholbermann/status/2019126631307309114?s=46&t=3bH8D8i-ig_gphDWbc5ibA
It’s impossible for us to understand, but these people are wholly unable to feel shame.
I'm retired now, but over the years of my career one of the things I learned was to be suspicious of company Mission Statements. Suspicious first because it seemed odd that creating such a thing should feel necessary. And second because invariably, the Mission Statement was quite often aspirational in its nature, and at worst simply a mirror image of what the company actually was.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I should have seen this coming at WAPO.
Your comment makes a lot of sense, but I'll still beg to differ. When the Post originally adopted the Democracy Dies in Darkness theme, it made eminent sense in view of Trump's drive to spread the darkness. And it now makes more sense than ever, but for Bezos utterly selling out.
Made sense, sure. But it was a hollow sentiment in the mind of the owner.
I think of all the Mission Statements I've seen that include "People, our most important asset.". As I said, aspirational at best.
Fully agree.
And now the darkness results from Bezos flicking the light switch to the off position.
I think he just wanted to be an astronaut and NASA wouldn’t take him because of his weird eye. Creating a ruthless business empire to fund his own space ship was his elaborate workaround.
The last 2 days of the Triad were some of my favorites, both because of the actual writing and the community’s comments. We all make each other smarter.
The Epstein files combined with the Bezos story really has me out here once again emphasizing that BILLIONAIRES SHOULD NOT EXIST. Late stage capitalism sure is something, right?!?!
My heart hurts for everyone at The Post. These are real people whose lives were just completely upended, and it makes me sick.
I read the WP for many years during the 16 election it was very good. I hope that I've been able to lower the collective IQ a bit. 🤡🌊
When I was at Amazon, I had many chances to see Jeff work up close. His behavior can be befuddling and weird, but it is consistent in its peculiarity.
I once got onto the shuttle between the two Seattle campuses and found it was just me and Jeff. I’d been in meetings with him, of course, but I knew I’d probably never have another chance to talk to him one-on-one. So I put a question to him that had been bugging me.
Amazon used a process they called “topgrading.”¹ Every year, as part of performance reviews, each manager’s team would be “stack-ranked” from lowest to highest performer — no ties allowed. The people at the top would be promoted; the people at the bottom would be fired.
I think this was my second year at Amazon, so I’d seen the process once already and was disturbed by it. So I asked him: how is this reasonable? Imagine we created a skunk-works — a team composed entirely of the people who’d just been promoted across the whole company. [This was not entirely hypothetical; there were skunk-works going on then for brands you probably use every day.] The next year, a percentage of those best and brightest would have to be fired no matter what, right? “How does that make any sense?”
Jeff replied that he was on the board of the Institute for Advanced Study. “You know what IAS is, right? In Princeton? Einstein. The best minds in the country — the world. And I got them to adopt topgrading. If IAS can do it, anyone can.” Then he took a phone call and ignored me for the rest of the trip.
It was an answer that flummoxed me at the time. He hadn’t answered me; he’d simply asserted, “you’re wrong and I’ve already doubled down.”
At Amazon there was a game people played where they’d claim to be on a secret “Jeff project” as a display of power. If they really were on one, putting up roadblocks or even asking about it was suicidal. But falsely claiming to be on one could get you fired — or worse. I saw it from both sides (both legitimate sides, to be clear — I never lied about being on a secret Jeff project), and it just created pointless palace intrigue and backstabbing. Jeff seemed to like it that way.
I’ve written before about his penchant for summarily firing entire groups whose work he didn’t understand, just to see if we could do without them. Frequently I had to plead with management not to go through with it — or to hire the same people back as hourly consultants at five times the cost. Jeff called these exercises “forcing functions.” In that light, the chaos of DOGE made perfect sense to me: just force-function the whole damned civil service.
That’s Jeff’s “rationalism”: make bold claims and never reexamine them in light of results; build structures that center him as the sole decider, but then absent himself from the actual decisions for plausible deniability.
What’s happening at the Washington Post looks like more of the same.
—
¹ The term “topgrading” comes from the hiring and performance-management system popularized by Brad Smart in *Topgrading* (1990s), itself influenced by earlier forced-ranking systems such as GE’s “vitality curve” under Jack Welch.
My God, the level of this narcissism of this man.
I personally think your question was quite insightful, so I’m sorry he didn’t actually answer it.
I have been in the business world for 40 years now and as high up in leadership as a Senior Director. The one thing I have learned is that most company presidents and CEO's aren't that bright. A lot of them attain their position by some form of bullying or connections, not necessarily performance.
I interviewed for a leadership position and made it to being one of two finalists. They selected the other candidate and to be honest it was the right decision for them. During that process I learned a lot about that company (culture, people, process) and they are pretty f***** up in general.
Amazon is successful at this point because of momentum and not leadership.
Don’t forget market dominance and predatory practices.
(I am 100% JOKING on that, and it is complete satire and humor so anyone empowered to enforce any part of my nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreement that may still be enforceable today need not be worried about it, just in case anyone is wondering, okay, good, glad we had this conversation. Oh — and mumble mumble Fair Use Doctrine, too, no infringement intended.)
Jack Welch did this at GE before Bezos. Said the churning turnover was "good" for the company.
Indeed. I remember at one all-hands meeting someone asking, “what are we going to do about the turnover rate? It’s becoming impossible to hire in the Seattle area, and predicating every new position on a relocation is a high source of friction.”
Jeff looked puzzled, called on the head of HR, and said “what’s the turnover rate? Just at corp?” I don’t remember the exact figure, but it was at least 25% and I think quite a bit higher — it was a number that was astonishing to me, and you heard gasps in the audience gathered in the Seattle theater rented out for the occasion. Let’s say 30%. “It’s holding steady year-over-year at 30%.”
Hearing this, Jeff turned back to the questioner: “See, it’s holding steady. We’re good.”
Absolutely disgusting and so tone deaf.
I'm not against wealth or money per se; I'm against the abuses it engenders and allows. Like power, it can corrupt absolutely. it is the rare person—the Warren Buffets, the FDRs, the TRs—who do not lose sight of what's real or give up their souls. It seems the richer people get, the greedier they get. Having it all isn't enough. They. want. more.
Unfortunately, since the 1980s, Americans have been trained to hate taxes; even the poorest among us think, all I need is a break—like winning powerball or the state lottery—and I can be just as wealthy as them. I don't want them to take my money either! Delusional, of course.
It doesn’t make for building teamwork that’s for sure.
Yes, and it helped destroy GE.
Of course he wouldn’t talk to you. You didn’t kiss the ring, you made him think. Nobody does that to Bezos./s
Very interesting. Maybe the underlying reasoning is this - knowing that the bottom of every team is getting fired, and there definitely is going to be a bottom in every team makes everyone willing to sacrifice more to outcompete their teammates. This is "good for the company".
Unfortunately, it doesn't respect the reality of a lot of people's lives or dignity, especially if they have family or health priorities that make them less able to outcompete peers. It probably doesn't help most people's mental health either. But hey, those things don't necessarily make for max profit and growth either.
Maybe it's ok if a business is clear with people that this is what they are signing up for, but it not the kind of business or world I would want to live in. Law of the jungle, with suits and surrounding civilization to allow it to look nice.
You’re absolutely right. I remember spending one Thanksgiving dinner at my home desk, trying to eat and engage with the rest of the party across the apartment while doing whatever I’d been paged for. When I finally could take my seat again (for coffee and the remnants of dessert) someone asked how often I had to work nights, weekends, and holidays.
Someone else (not at Amazon, but doing the same sort of work) pointed out that it would be trivial to do a database query to see what days I’d had off even if you presume I checked messages every day by looking to see how often I’d used “sudo”, a program that’s used to control and monitor the use of administrative access. (The joke goes, “Make me a sandwich.” “What?? Make it yourself.” “Sudo make me a sandwich.” “Okay.”) Find days when I hadn’t “sudo’d”, and you’d basically find days I was truly “off”.
So right there at the holiday table, I ran the query for them over the prior year, and it turned up no results. Odd. My friend suggested I check for dates before I started work to see if my query was bad. Nope — it spit out every date before I started, none after. “Try searching for the last 12-hour period you didn’t sudo.”
I discovered that by that criteria — the last time I’d had TWELVE HOURS to myself, including sleeping, vacations, and having and recovering from a tonsillectomy — after my first month when I was training up, there had been two times in the four years I’d been there. *Two.*
I left the company and came back to New York less than six months later.
I haven't ever worked in an environment like that, but I think I can understand why you would leave.
I think big picture - if people want to give complete control of life to a company that's ok, if it's their choice. The rub to me is when most of the fruits of that labor are going to increase the size of Jeff's pile of money, over and above all else, even accounting for other shareholders. I remember a web article from a few years ago that displayed median income in the US and poverty level and a bunch of other commonly known fortunes as a full-page graph that you had to manually scroll through to see their size. The last entry was Bezo's and you had to go on and on and on scrolling for probably 5 minutes after the last big fortunes were done. The typical household income ranges were gone in the first blip. It just made you recon with how absurdly large the amount of money some people have amassed really is. So...should anyone get fired for not working extra hard to make more money for this organization...
Law of the jungle makes sense if it really is competing for limited food in a wild environment. If it's plunked down in the middle of a Civilization of laws and is used to justify harming others to amass more money, I think it's a load of crap. It's a way for the biggest takers to justify their excess at other people's expense.
Yes. I went from Amazon to Google and it felt like a breath of fresh air. I can’t say what’s happened since I left 10 years ago — it doesn’t sound good — but at that time, it was like night and day.
Like, there was an all-hands meeting where they announced that it was silly to continue to act like a scrappy start-up in how they paid people. Larry Page got up and said that, ethically, he didn’t feel right continuing to underpay just because people would take the job for the Google prestige — and perks didn’t make up for it. (At that time, Larry still reviewed every single technical employee’s interviews and made the final hiring decision, so it was understandable that he’d feel personally accountable.)
So, effective immediately, he increased everyone’s pay to market without regard to their seniority or performance, and sent everyone home that day with a significant cash bonus. (At the home office, envelopes of literal cash, which turned out to be a mistake when the press got wind of it before the end of the business day, they ended up needing to rent transport for everyone in the Bay Area to get home safely.)
That alone could be read as “the least you could do” or wrapping a business necessity in virtue-signaling clothing. But it was an all-hands and people could ask questions. One person got up and asked “can we also increase the employee charity match from 50% to 100%, too?” Larry, Sergey and Eric looked at each other with a “sounds good to me” expression, called on the CFO right there to ask if that was doable, and said yes. It wasn’t in the FAQ prepared for the event, so they really did make that decision right then and there.
So Google’s fall especially saddens me. It’s very reminiscent of how Sarah describes the double-haters coming to be dominant. It *wasn’t* always true that everyone was always acting purely avariciously. But given recent behavior, it doesn’t seem cynical to assert that if you weren’t there.
Your description of Jeff Bezos’ rationalism sounds eerily like Trump’s own management style, right down to the plausible deniability, in many ways with just different personalities. Did you ever become un-flummoxed by his non-answer of just chalk it up to his process of decision making? This sounds like the sort of management style if you don’t value the people and talent working for you or think them disposable at any moment.
He was very good at making everyone in a planning or tech meeting with him feel like another valued member of the team. He wasn’t prone to the Steve Jobs-esque fits of rages that would leave employees sobbing or thinking they’d been fired when he’d already forgotten they existed.
I can only guess about it, but I think these types need chaos around them, even if they must needlessly create it. “Chaos is a ladder,” for the Littlefingers of the world.
So I can’t answer your question directly, but that charisma making people feel as if he had qualities that, if anything, he had the absolute opposite of does seem very Trump-esque, doesn’t it?
What is it with us that people at the very top won’t or don’t want to take accountability for what they manage and control? Accountability these days is clearly for the little people. As a warehouse employer Amazon is not bad with good benefits for the industry and programs to train and promote those with initiative. It really isn’t a bad option in that category.
Not to mention the greed, selfishness, and narcissism.
Forced ranking can work, in limited circumstances. But as an ongoing way to manage it has major limitations, like getting rid of institutional knowledge that can really help an organization navigate a low frequency but high risk event.
I don’t think one that invariably requires one or more firings in every single stack could ever “work” in the sense of being “better enough” in any metric to justify the capricious cruelty and disruption. It particularly rankled for someone like me who worked in groups like Website Engineering, where there was great selectivity and filling an empty slot was very hard.
(Just to put it concretely: I don’t know what the ratio was at Amazon, but I know for a fact that at Google the proportion of new hires to applicants across the company — notoriously tiny, more selective than any Ivy League university — was, by pure coincidence but memorably, almost exactly the same as the proportion of new technical hires to those who could be slotted into the equivalent job title. In other words, a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction. And then you *must fire* some of them a year later?!?)
The management 'style' Bezos, Musk and other lazy mangers is make insane cuts and watch the underlings scramble. See if they can take up the slack or the company can make a profit or (in the case of Musk) become a tool for 'influencing'. If so, the CEO is a genius. If not, the DEO will unobtrusively reinstate some, but the least amount possible so the underlings are working past their long-term capacity. They'll have saved money and shareholders will reward them. If the company goes under, Donald Trump shows it doesn't matter.
I don’t disagree with your overall sentiment, but it’s arithmetically impossible that moves like those “forcing-function” firings could meaningfully impact shareholder perceptions, since fully-loaded their salaries and benefits are unlikely to be even one one-hundredth of a percent of total expenses.¹ They certainly wouldn’t publicize such a firing in a press release or shareholder communication.
If they were done at the scale DOGE did, sure, but these weren’t housecleanings, these were random and capricious based on whatever happened to catch their attention. They didn’t have a “chief sacking officer” who went around and did these things across the company.
—
¹ Addendum, 16:55 EDT: It always bothers me when I throw something like that out without checking. Not to pat myself on the back *too much*, but in 2005, Amazon’s total reported costs were approx. $8B. The fully-loaded cost of a typical technical team in 2005 would have been ~$1.4M. So, ~0.0175%. So, actually, almost two hundredths of a percent, but I was definitely in the right ballpark.
I've had thoughts about the Washington Post. ( https://neoreality.substack.com/p/russian-roulette-bad-for-america ) To me it's obvious that they never would have ever dared to proclaim 'Democracy Dies in Darkness' in the first place if they had realized that it wasn't a single politician but an entire political party that had turned against the concept of democracy and towards authoritarianism. The Washington Post is not willing to intentionally alienate half the country; those are people it wants to try to get to buy its newspaper.
(It did alienate the liberal half with their authoritarian turn, but they didn't think they were doing it at the time. JVL said once that 'what people don't understand is that Fox News is as far left as it can possibly go without losing readers.' What people at the Washington Post didn't understand is that the Post was already as far right as it could possibly go without losing readers, for much the same reason.)
Now, they obviously had no intention of doing anything to prevent democracy's death in the darkness, just reminding you that you had a duty to purchase their paper, and that duty did not come with any responsibilities accruing to them. But they were willing to cloak themselves in the guardians of democracy as long as they thought that basically the entire country liked the concept of elections. Once that was revealed to no longer be the case, the Washington Post was forced to become, at best, election-agnostic.
Now it is election-opposed, but this shouldn't surprise us either. As you've said, the marginal value of money isn't that high. Sure, supporting the Democrats might give the people at the top of an extra billion or two dollars, and supporting Donald Trump might cost them ten billion dollars, but they'll still be rich.
What does Donald Trump give them that they'll never get anywhere else? Donald Trump tells them that they have no responsibilities to anyone, that they can be as cruel as they like and enjoy themselves, that morality is fake and gay, that you should be allowed to fire your employees if they won't have sex with you. That's worth way more to them than an extra billion dollars.
There is only one thing someone in a dystopia can offer someone in a utopia - the libidinous pleasure of domination. And real domination, the real thing, not just play-acting about it.
I think this saying also comes into play: "a hit dog will holler."
Trump brutalized Bezos during his first term by threatening to weaponize the federal government against Amazon and other Bezos businesses because WaPo wrote critical articles about Trump. To avoid losing billions of dollars from Trump weaponizing government against him in Trump's second term, Bezos caved.
He turned the Washington Post into the New York Post, and Bezos has bribed Trump with over a $100 million with the Melania flop movie, donations to Trump's ballroom, and Trump's various PACs and money laundering operations.
Hear, hear!
I cannot “like” this comment enough: it is spot-on.
Row 4 for the Bulwark show in MPLS! Yay!
You’re going to have so much fun! I went to both Philly shows and each were so cool.
I want reflections on each Sunday’s gospel readings every Monday. Fight that audience capture.
Don't tempt me!
“A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house” says today’s reading, actually.
There's a reason we have the shirts, I suppose
I really do appreciate your Catholic inflected pieces, even the inside baseball. Maybe I have commented this before but I grew up in the Diocese of Rapid City, SD - first when Charles Chaput was bishop and later Blase Cupich. I was at a formative age when Bishop Chaput seemed to really push politics into Church life there. I remember my Dad having a conversation with our parish priest saying he wouldn't become a Republican to stay a Catholic. Lots of tension around topics like have you committed a mortal sin if you vote for a Democrat, ect... Your writing on how politics and Catholic faith can come together has helped me unwind a lot of that kind of tension. Thank you for that!
Chaput's tenure in Philadelphia is why I'm "former."
He said cafeteria Catholics aren't welcome. I took him at his word.
I hear you; former as well. But Cardinal Tobin of Newark is starting to sound good to me. https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2026/01/26/cardinal-tobin-nj-defund-ice-alex-pretti-shooting/88362539007/
Yeah, seems similar to what I remember. Lots of line drawing about what kind of people were or were not welcome. That's strange in Church to begin with, but doubly strange when the lines are being drawn around party politics.
We're supposed to blindly forgive the transgressions of priests preying on the vulnerable. Yet, I'm not welcome because my monogoumus wife and I would use some latex for some activities.
I can't take moral instruction from an entity with such messed up priorities.
Maybe a separate newsletter.
A WONDERFUL idea. Weekly guest sholars/writers/leaders from varied faiths, including those without (Catholic turned athiest here) sharing perspectives intersecting with current state-of-the-world? I'd buy it.
I might enjoy reading it, but I would hope it would appear in an entirely separate stream, not mixed in with regular JVL posts on this channel.
There is space for this. First Things used to be fairly thoughtful before it took on the role of a Red State religion newsletter.
I would love to see Bulwark Religion. We keep saying we aren't in the realm of politics but morals now.
I enjoyed your piece yesterday immensely. This moment to me feels exactly the way you outlined.
Thank you for being willing to share perspective without a finger to the wind
I strongly suggest that people drop WAPO, Amazon Prime and Amazon streaming services and use that money to support independent journalism and the Resistance. Why give Jeff Bezos a nickel. He’s already got all the money he wants coming in through DoD contracts. (Or DOW, at least in Hegseth’s mind)
The golden goose we need to figure out how to kill is Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Businesses are the customer there, yes? Businesses don't really care about democracy. I don't see it.
Correct. Businesses would have to kill AWS not the general population. Tech shifts. There will be a day when AWS can't pivot but in the end even if AWS died, the billionaire would survive with a minimal scratch (can't say the same for the investors)
I suspect AWS will die before businesses kill it. If Bezos doesn't do something about all the targeted attacks, businesses will start looking for something more reliable. Now, who is doing the DDOS attacks, I don't know.
I do everything I can to not buy from Amazon. My kids think I'm nuts. I just tell them I don't want any of my money going to Jeff Bezos and is weirdo wife.
Late-20th-century critiques of deregulation and wealth worship aged well because they warned that concentrated money becomes concentrated power. The Post isn’t dying from “market forces,” it’s being gutted because Bezos can ignore losses and still reshape a civic institution to fit his preferences. The point is that when owners are immune to consequences, the public loses accountability. This is what “free market” talk looks like when the market can’t discipline the billionaire.
Ashley Parker of The Atlantic has a beautiful, heartfelt, heartbreaking piece today on The Atlantic’s site about The Washington Post and her long personal and professional ties to it. I highly recommend reading it, and I believe non-subscribers can access it as long as they haven’t already hit their freebie article maximum!
gift link for anyone interested: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/02/washington-post-layoffs-bezos/685872/?gift=AHZ8tOJBlB6VrQUBsNa5NaRTzKNOnSjnxCE3tLHbOjA&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Thanks for doing that, Leah! 😊
Her article brought me to tears.
It brought tears to my eyes as well ~ The tenderness with which she wrote…I wish vast numbers of people would awaken and work together to keep the uniqueness of America alive. Thank goodness for The Bulwark!
Me too.
To repeat a comment from last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer is in the black. It's 100% possible for a modern newspaper to make money.
I don't agree on Bezos' motivations. I don't think he just wants to destroy things. I think he's more interested in protecting his federal contracts for computer services.
Three cheers for the Philly Ink!
Yes, the Washington Post is dead ... dead by the deliberate hand of its owner.
I was assigned to Defense Language School East Coast (DLIEC) during the Watergate conspiracy. The Washington Post was a real, vital, and vitally important journal then and for many years afterward. It's demise is really, really sad.
Democracy Dies in Darkness turned out to be a game plan.
Perhaps. Bezos bought The Post in 2013; "Democracy Dies in Darkness" was added in 2017.
And killed in 2024.
Enjoyed the column. I’d make one observation. I doubt Bezos trashed then torched the Wash Post out of an enjoyment of watching the destruction. I think it is something much worse and much more telling about the failure of our elites to face this version of the Republican party.
It was nothing personal, just a business decision. The Post is by far the smallest part of Bezos’ portfolio. Both Amazon and Blue Origin are much larger, have greater current grown and the potential for large future returns. However, they are both subject to a much greater level of government regulation and the attendant ability of the government to harm their value. His immolation of the Post is nothing more than a sacrifice on the Orange God Kings bonfire of the vanities. If eliminating the Post as a viable force for independent journalism is the price of keeping the Feds out of Amazon and the FAA allowing his launch windows for Blue Origin’s satellite communication network, it makes complete economic sense for any spreadsheet jockey.
The fact that such a man, showered with riches by his success at innovation aided and facilitated by our countries investments in education, infrastructure, rule of law, free flow of capital & labor and government paid for R&D, is willing to make such a business decision in search of more wealth and power piled on top of his hoard shows his utter lack of principle, honor or decency. Characteristic that seem to be shared by all of our elites who we see daily making the same “business decisions”. They are morally corrupt.
I remember that last year someone was putting together a consortium of investors to buy the paper. At that time I commented on WAPO that Linda French and Mackenzie Scott buy the paper and run it themselves. Bezos won’t sell. Yes, it is small potatoes to him, but he would have to agree that he failed. He won’t admit that.