28 August 2020

Why Jeff Bezos is Worth $200 Billion

Bill Gates became the richest man in the world in 1995 for creating a platform (in the form of Word, Excel, Outlook, Project) that enabled knowledge workers to be more productive.

Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world in 2018 for creating a platform that enabled entrepreneurs to be more productive.

Not only does Amazon have more than 500,000 employees, it has "2 million sellers, hundreds of thousands of authors, [and] millions of Amazon Web Services developers.” And, Bezos reports, "In 2017, for the first time in history, more than half of units sold on Amazon worldwide were from third-party sellers."

Bezos' wealth reached $200 billion yesterday, further evidence to me that we're transitioning from an information to an entrepreneurial economy. Meanwhile, we have a president still assuring his base that he'll make America great again again by getting them back into an industrial economy.

Every second the software that drives the Amazon platform is updated multiple times. The software in our head that defines our worldview gets updated far more slowly than that. The latter has created a crisis; the former more than a trillion in wealth.

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