
How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers - snowisgone
https://www.whenrulesdontapply.com/
======
turc1656
Notice the difference: " _Top executives_ of leading tech companies secretly
agreed among themselves not to hire each other’s employees"

"...brought charges against the _companies_ "

They should have been indicting both, or just the executives for their
explicit role in this criminal behavior. I really detest the lack of
individual accountability in all these cases when we deal with large
companies. If this was a couple of small, local competitors who were the only
two [whatever] in the area and they did this, I guarantee you the owners would
be individually indicted.

~~~
munk-a
I agree, there is far too much ability to transfer liability in the modern
world which lets this sort of stuff get abstract and easier to dismiss.
Companies should be held accountable to the extent their growth has encouraged
bad behavior, but individuals at that company committed the behavior and, if
they were instructed to do so and blindly followed then...

1\. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a valid excuse

2\. Go after the coercers or modify our understanding of liability to allow
those targeted to make the argument that their superiors deserve to repay them
every bit of penalty they owed.

Really, in the modern world, just sue someone and tell them they're on the
hook but they'll be allowed to sue whoever is responsible for their portion of
the responsibility and watch this all work itself out quickly.

~~~
crowdpleaser
"Just following orders" was a valid excuse until the Nuremberg trials.

~~~
mtgx
You don't think people were executed post-war for "just following orders"
before the Nuremberg trials?

In other words, do you really think such people got off easy before the
Nuremberg trials? If anything, much worse has happened to them throughout
history, because the kings and dictators didn't have to put them through a
judicial process.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Whether or not you're punished for following orders has more to do with
whether or not you're on the side that writes history than anything else.

~~~
munk-a
This is an embarrassment of the victor and never celebrated - atrocious actors
on the victorious side have been punished at times throughout history but I
agree the bar is higher. It certainly isn't celebrated though - and informed
societies can still be outraged (See Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, Yemenese drone
strikes under Obama & Trump, the Bay of Pigs, Guatemala... the general
familiarity of this list is a testament to the fact that the victor can be
held accountable - even if individual actors are generally given more
levity[1]...)

[1] _sigh_ Oliver North, honestly America... why did you never... eh.

~~~
stirfrykitty
Depends on the situation. Let's say you have a hostile war captive (enemy
combative of a high rank) who is the ONLY one who can provide you with
critical, war-winning details. You (metaphorically) would want to do whatever
it took to secure those details. I've been in hairy situations before.
Everything Hollywood depicts goes out the window. Embedded reporters get a
newfound respect for troops once they ride out just one hot encounter. They
understand the need for the military to do what they do, and are likewise
frustrated when the military's hands are needlessly tied when they shouldn't
be. I agree to not engage in heinous acts for their own sake, but sometimes
more vigorous actions are needed to win for the sake of innocent lives. Case
in point being ISIS. They should have been afforded zero grace. In fact, my
aforementioned situation has played out in the real many times over. Imagine
if the man above had kidnapped a loved one. You would do and sanction anything
necessary to get back your loved one. Failure to see this is a moral failure
on the part of the one to make the right decisions. There are some situations
where "anything goes" is the way to go. Thankfully they are few and far
between.

~~~
Robin_Message
The problem with this kind of consequentialist ethics is that thinking the end
justifies the means generally makes you very vulnerable to manipulation by
others who tell you what the ends will be and then ask you to do the means.

Remember, Guantanamo also had taxi drivers and aid workers in it. How many of
them are you willing to torture in order to find the terrorist you've captured
and maybe get some information that might help stop a future terrorist plot?
The hypothetical of capturing a top general with a tight deadline provides a
terrible intuition when it comes to torture.

But that is exactly the kind of intuition Rumsfeld et al wanted people to be
thinking about, in order to justify torture^W enhanced interrogation
techniques.

~~~
stirfrykitty
You (metaphorically) still didn't answer the underlying question, namely,
wouldn't you do anything it took to save a loved one? The answer isn't grey,
it's black and white. The answer is always YES to doing what it takes to save
one's family. You have a moral imperative to do whatever it takes to keep your
own safe, up to, and including, your own life. You fail your family morally if
you fail to act when you could do so. People like to throw in these trick
questions like, "If you could save your own child, but nine others would die;
or you could save the nine and your own would die. What would you choose?"
Save my own child every time.

~~~
MockObject
So, then you'd kill 6 billion to save your own child.

~~~
stirfrykitty
That is patently ridiculous and taken to the extreme and you know it. We are
talking reasonable possible situations (not world events) that you may find
yourself in. And yes, if I had a choice to save an entire building or just my
kid, it's my kid every time. I fail them morally if I do not. I'm not
responsible for other people's family, just my own. Now... if I could save my
kid and everyone else, then yes. But my kid first.

~~~
MockObject
Hardly ridiculous, it's inescapably implied by

> The answer isn't grey, it's black and white. The answer is always YES to
> doing what it takes to save one's family.

You didn't really need to make such an absolute point, but you did.

------
nostrademons
So I was at one of these companies when the scandal broke. I didn't get
screwed quite so much as my coworkers, since I'd only been working there for a
year or so. The settlement was a joke - I got about $1100, but my compensation
increased by roughly $100K/year the year after the cartel broke, and kept
rising. Can't say I'm terribly pleased about either the wage-fixing or the
settlement, but...

My wife works in philanthropy, and one of her jobs is investing in homeless
shelters. We were talking the other day about how the Bay Area's
housing/homelessness crisis is a _direct_ consequence of the collapse of the
high-tech wage-fixing cartel. Before 2010, the wage distribution from one of
these huge companies was that founders and VCs would make billions, ~1000
early employees would end up with millions, and the rest of the employees live
comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyles. The ~1000 employees who could cash
out pre-IPO stock options would bid up prices in
Hillsborough/Atherton/PacHeights/Woodside to ~$5M, but the rest of the Bay
Area would be priced at what an ordinary professional could afford. After the
cartel broke, the compensation structure changed so we have ~100K engineers
each making ~$300-400K/year. That's enough to buy _all_ the available housing
inventory in the region. So now house prices in Mountain View and Sunnyvale go
from $800K -> $2.4M, and you must be a dual-tech-income family to afford a
house.

I say this not to imply that the cartel was a good thing (cartels are bad, and
I'd much rather the solution be greater wage equality for everyone and
building more housing so everyone can stay in the area), but to highlight the
problem of unintended consequences. I've seen many people ask "Why don't
companies hire remote workers at Silicon Valley wages?" and in the same breath
say "Because I would never move to the third-world hellhole that the Bay Area
has become", not realizing that if they _did_ hire remote workers, _the same
thing would happen in their communities_. Inflation is the flip side of higher
wages; when everybody gets paid more, everything costs more.

~~~
pathseeker
>So now house prices in Mountain View and Sunnyvale go from $800K -> $2.4M,

This just proves that the housing crises was the same before. A regular
middle-class income cannot afford an $800k home. The problem is the same
before and after: there isn't enough supply for people who want homes.

Until you look at sales numbers and supply, your analysis is meaningless.
Increased wages don't make housing prices increase.

>not realizing that if they did hire remote workers, the same thing would
happen in their communities.

Again, this is bullshit. Google could hire 10,000 remote employees at SV wages
in somewhere like the Detroit area and it would have a negligible impact on
housing prices because the supply is so large.

Remember, techies still make up a tiny percentage of the bay area population.
1% of the population being flush with cash should have absolutely zero impact
on a healthy housing market.

~~~
nostrademons
I don't deny that the root cause of this issue is lack of supply. I'm saying
that over short time periods (and sometimes over long ones where NIMBY
policies rule), lack of housing supply is a given, and so the consequence of
more money for housing is not more housing, it's higher housing prices.

1% of the population being flush with cash has virtually no effect on a
housing market where 5% of the housing stock turns over every year. It has a
very large effect when < 1% of the housing stock turns over. If people start
seeing an effect, they have every incentive not to turn their house over while
its value is still going up. Right now, Mountain View has 111 homes for sale
in a city of 80,000. Sunnyvale has 156 in a city of 150,000. Cupertino has 56
in a city of 40,000, San Francisco has 706 in a city of a million.

Realistically, if these big tech companies offered full remote work (which
they actually do, if you've been at the company long enough, but a relatively
small portion of the employees meet the tenure & job performance
requirements), you wouldn't get 10,000 remote employees in Detroit. You'd get
100,000 remote employees who are free to move around the U.S. to whichever
city they prefer most. It's highly likely they will clump in cities that are
desirable for techies - Seattle, Portland, Boulder, Austin, Boston, NYC,
Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durham. All except the last 2 are already getting their
own version of a mini-housing-crisis, but not to the extent that the Bay Area
is.

~~~
wyclif
What would you say the "dark horse" second or third-tier tech cities are in
the US right now, the ones that still have good infrastructure and quality of
life but aren't suffering from a housing crisis?

------
cliffy
The settlement is laughable given the number of people whose salaries were
held down as a result of this collusion. It's not just workers at these
companies that suffer. It has a network effect of holding salaries down at
companies which aren't even colluding.

Another example of (usually giant) companies deciding to risk breaking the law
because its cheaper in the long run to do so.

~~~
skybrian
It was a long time ago. I got a raise out of it and later retired early, and
I'm a pretty average software engineer, for Google anyway. Your argument that
I "suffered" when actually they treated me very well by almost any standard
isn't going to work.

Based on what I've heard about current salaries for in-demand people, I think
it's safe to say that any depressing effect on software engineers' salaries is
long gone?

And if not, and this is what holding down salaries looks like, imagine what
the housing market would be like without it.

~~~
cliffy
This reads like Stockholm Syndrome at its finest.

You're OK with them paying you less because you still got paid well by some
standard? You (and as a result many other people) would be making more both in
the past and today if they hadn't colluded.

For at least some subset of those affected by this collusion the salary lost
will make a significant difference in their families' and their own quality of
life either now or in the future.

~~~
skybrian
It was never OK, but it was settled, they don't do that anymore, and besides,
Steve Jobs (who apparently started it) is dead.

And as for the people theoretically adversely affected, you'd have to figure
out who they are, which wouldn't be easy, since it's people who were in demand
enough that they might have started a bidding war.

There is not much more justice to be had in this case. If you're interested in
pursuing justice, why not focus on current problems with identifiable victims?

~~~
daniel-cussen
A bidding war is precisely what should have happened. It's called competition
and is the number one way capitalism is supposed to end up serving the public
interest.

And reading your comments on this page, I have to ask: are you representing
nobody's opinion but your own, on your own terms?

~~~
skybrian
Yes, just my own opinions.

------
ChuckMcM
The critical thing here is that if pay was uncontrolled, then skilled
employees could market themselves to the highest payer, and that would put
more of the profits of the work of those employees into employee pay instead
of into company margin (aka profit).

It is pretty clear when you look at the revenue per employee numbers at some
of these 'digital product' companies (specifically Google and Facebook), that
rank and file employees are not sharing equally with management in the
returns.

That is not to say that pay is bad, or that wage theft is going on (extreme
positions), employees in California at least are at will and can quit at any
time to offer their services to another player. The regulatory requirement
though is to identify and prevent collusion between those players in keeping
salaries low.

~~~
pathseeker
>equally with management in the returns.

Managers at Google don't make much more and in some cases don't make more than
the SWEs they manage. Did you mean to say shareholders?

~~~
e40
I was told by someone in HR that has HR friends at Google that the manager of
a group always makes at least as much as the highest paid employee in that
group.

~~~
ariwilson
This is definitely incorrect.

------
inlined
One of the things that made my mind explode was that this was blatantly
recommended in The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Horowitz argues that your
relationship with your business partner is worth more than the employee and
you shouldn’t entertain solicitations for employment.

~~~
munk-a
This is why, as an employee, I am not willing to put my neck out for my
employer - modern society and goings on are a pretty clear lesson that
employees that take risks for a company end up eating them and nobody higher
up cares (unless it's essentially free to care, which is more easily explained
by self-interested behavior than any sort of altruism).

------
tbarbugli
> estimated $3 billion in lost wages. Before the case went to trial, the
> companies settled for a total of $435 million

So you get busted doing something illegal and walk away with a 2.5Billion in
your pocket and 0 jail time. How do you expect execs to not do this all the
time?

~~~
skybrian
We are talking about a hypothetical wage calculation with many unknowns versus
a cash settlement. In truth, nobody knows what would have happened in the
counterfactual case, but settlements require picking a number.

~~~
thatoneuser
The number ought to err too high, not too low. This is supposed to be
punishment and deterrent, not a gamble to get ahead illegally.

~~~
skybrian
Maybe it was already on the high side? How do we know?

------
gok
> Top executives of leading tech companies secretly agreed among themselves
> not to hire each other’s employees

That's not accurate. The agreement was about recruiters cold-calling each
other's employees. Employees were free to reach out on their own between
companies. Workers routinely switched companies while the agreement was in
effect.

I still think it was bullshit, but it wasn't quite as egregious as the article
makes it sound.

Disclaimer: I was one of the affected employees, and got a share of the
settlement.

~~~
arebop
Your statement is also not accurate, because there were several variants of
"the agreement" and for some pairs of companies the agreement extended beyond
cold-calling [[https://www.lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/high-tech-
employees/](https://www.lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/high-tech-employees/)].
I'm sure multiple careers were set back when their prospective employer's HR
department notified their current employer's HR department about the
disloyalty.

~~~
gok
Those allegations didn't have very strong evidence. They were repeated by some
lawyers looking for people to opt out of the class action. When I asked for
details they didn't have anything.

------
splonk
I was a member of the class and got a settlement. It's been quite some time so
I don't recall the details exactly, but I think the settlement was divided
through some combination of the amount of time you were employed through the
time period in question, and maybe base salary or title? I would have been in
the maximum bracket for time but probably pretty low in the salary/title
spectrum as software engineers go. I think the amount I got was just under
$7k.

FWIW, I didn't feel particularly underpaid at the time, given that I was
making way more than I'd ever had at any other point in my life, although I
was relatively junior then and didn't have a good grip on the market. It ended
up just being a bonus for essentially no effort on my part. I don't hold any
major personal antipathy towards any part of the process.

------
drdeadringer
I don't know how this is still a super secret unknown to the public at large.
This has been reported for years. What am I missing?

~~~
arebop
These employees aren't very sympathetic victims. Nobody wants to hear about
how some 5%-er with a bunch of good alternatives should be making more and
having more choices about who to work for.

You'll even find in the comments here that many of the affected employees
themselves feel they got at worst a fair deal, because after all some (most!)
workers get paid less and work in harsher conditions and so forth.

------
fullshark
It is pretty amazing how this story was memory-holed by so many in the
industry.

------
thorwasdfasdf
It's interesting the lengths they'll go to rip off their own workers, and yet
they won't even make the slightest effort to hire in locations where labor is
much cheaper. There's countless places in the US where they could've fairly
paid 1/3 less. And significantly more savings outside the US.

~~~
skybrian
These companies have offices all over the world, including China and India.

------
Animats
It should be possible to crunch through LinkedIn histories and determine where
there's collusion between employers. If moves between employer A and employer
B are lower than between A to C and C to B, something funny is going on.

~~~
stcredzero
With something as complex as employment decisions, there could be a lot of
confounding factors. Example: What if A and B are located somewhere more
desirable? There may naturally be a desire to stay where you are and less
impetus to move. A and B might be in a class of company which confers more
prestige, so there would be less impetus to move. A and B might entail more
risk somehow. There are many of these.

Using bulk statistics to show things like bias and collusion is fraught with
these issues.

~~~
tomjakubowski
If A and B are both located in desirable locations, and C is not, then the
strangeness of there being more A->C->B jumps than A->B is only stronger.

If A and B are in the same desirable location, all the weirder.

~~~
stcredzero
_If A and B are both located in desirable locations, and C is not, then the
strangeness of there being more A- >C->B jumps than A->B is only stronger._

Again, you're assuming that there only a few entirely orthogonal variables. If
A and B are both located in a desirable location, the cost of moving to A or
the cost of moving to B might be high enough, such that it's only justified if
there is a large increase in salary. So this factor might well apply more to
moving from C->A than it would A->B or B->A. The same housing expenses might
also motivate other people to move from A->C. In this case, you might well see
more A->C->B jumps than A->B.

However, none of these are cleanly applicable to real people in the real
world. We're not dealing with particles or spherical cows here.

~~~
Animats
That's just one metric. This is a good machine learning problem. Use companies
caught in anti-poaching collusion to train the system.

------
wyldfire
> A separate class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of 64,000 tech workers
> for an estimated $3 billion in lost wages. Before the case went to trial,
> the companies settled for a total of $435 million.

How would we know if they resumed the bad behavior?

~~~
rak00n
That's only $6796.87 per person.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Depending on how much the mean/median person's base salary is that's on the
order of a bonus. On one hand it's not that much. On the other hand I'd be
pissed if I didn't get my bonus because of some back room deal between execs.

~~~
inlined
It’s not nearly the amount of an annual bonus, which is typically about 15%
base pay. This is the order of a spot bonus (e.g. the director wants to thank
you for working double time to make a product launch happen in time for a
conference). Or it’s the price of 1-3 successful referrals to a company.

~~~
leesec
"It’s not nearly the amount of an annual bonus, which is typically about 15%
base pay."

Not in plenty of industries.

------
DINKDINK
I wonder how much small firms/startups have /benefited/ from this arrangement.
By artificially reducing demand for labor, big tech firms have effectively
made it more profitable for smaller firms to compete against them.

~~~
rightbyte
I think you got it the other way around. They have decreased the price of
labour and thus increased the demand for it.

This is more or less an employer union.

~~~
jorgemf
I don't get your point. As I understand it they have decreased the demand to
decrease the price.

~~~
rightbyte
It's a approximately a zero sum game in the cartel. That was my point. If the
price goes down the demand goes up. So the total demand for programmers
increase (the demand for the other companies programmers decrease, of-course).

It's a subjective matter of semantics, though.

------
yonran
I think the tech anti-poaching lawsuit is kind of a strange case because these
are the highly-paid employees, not entry-level laborers, and the free market
for top employees is likely to increase inequality, which is sort of the
opposite of the goal of the Sherman Act. It’s similar to how collusion in the
NBA reduces wages at the top while increasing team profits as well as enabling
higher wages at the bottom (sports teams are excluded from the Sherman
antitrust act), making a more viable ecosystem (see Planet Money episode
[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/11/628137929/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/11/628137929/episode-427-lebron-
james-is-still-underpaid)). So it’s possible that forcing a free market of top
employees will increase wage inequality. And ironically, politicians now
complain that these tech companies are paying too _much_ , driving up the rent
of housing (thanks to the region’s restricted housing supply), since the lack
of housing channels high wages into the pockets of landlords.

How should the Bay Area economy have grown in the past decade if we had wanted
to prevent the poverty created by tech and landlord wealth? We should have
allowed far more housing supply, allowing apartments to bid down rents and
also allowing new workers to bid down wages. We should have had higher taxes
on land, allowing the poor to share the wealth created by the increasing
concentration of employment centers. And we should have had higher national
income taxes, spreading the wealth from the highest-paid workers in the
winners-take-all economy to the rest. But given the dysfunctional local
government (restrictive zoning), dysfunctional state government (Proposition
13), and dysfunctional national government (low top tiers and low taxes on
homeowner rents), the collusion that the tech companies did was not clearly a
bad thing. The Sherman Act is about enabling the price signal to be the
“central nervous system of the economy” (U.S. v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co) to
mobilize labor and capital. But when the dominant factor in the labor market
is local governments’ restrictions on the housing supply which prevent
mobility, I don’t see much point in enforcing the antitrust act against
companies.

------
ArtDev
By depressing tech wages, workers are forced out of big tech companies and
into smaller companies with competitive salaries but fewer open positions.

Big companies complain they can't find enough workers with their relatively
low wages, and lobby for more H1b worker visas, depressing wages even further
as foreign workers cannot change companies easily without moving back to their
native countries first.

I can totally imagine Steve Jobs writing that email over "no poaching" to the
other big tech companies.

------
briantakita
Powerful people colluding? Sounds like one of those "conspiracy
theories"</sarc>

Given how these large companies have a penchant to buy a promising company
just to kill the product a couple years later, it seems like it's in the
market's best interest to encourage distribution of power. This includes
encouraging entrepreneurship with technologists & incentives to grow
individual businesses to profitability, while discouraging M & A.

------
skybrian
This happened but it's old news. I remember when they announced the raise we
got as a result. If you never heard of it, you weren't affected.

------
scottlegrand2
I think the latest expression of this concept came out when a friend of mine
was up for a senior role at Google and they ended consideration when they
suddenly decided that he switched jobs too often to be a leader, but they were
happy to continue considering him for a role beneath what he currently already
had.

~~~
Nevermark
Isn't that a reasonable concern?

The decision is specific to that one candidate and related directly to the
candidates work history.

Is there no N, where N is the number of jobs someone has had in the last five
years, where you would consider someone to be a questionable candidate for a
key position?

------
acdc4life
“A separate class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of 64,000 tech workers
for an estimated $3 billion in lost wages.“

So they went through all this effort to save 3 billion/64000 = $46,875 per
employee. Is that how it should be interpreted? If so, these executives are
greedy scum.

------
JTbane
IMO, there ought to be a law that makes it easier to pierce the corporate veil
in these sorts of cases.

------
DontGiveTwoFlux
Can any member of the class lawsuit here comment on the settlement? How did
that work out for you?

~~~
shereadsthenews
Not a member of that class but one of the things that happened as a result of
these revelations was that everyone at Google got a large raise (much larger
than typical annual raises) and a substantial one-time cash bonus which
appeared to be, during the announcement, just Eric being Uncle Moneybags but
just after the all-hands we all found out the reason from the newspapers.

~~~
inlined
Are you talking about the 2010 adjustment or something in more recent years. I
don’t remember this.

~~~
hopler
2010

------
yeahitslikethat
I can't reconcile how anyone with integrity would work at these firms. Which
then it follows that only people without integrity work at these firms.

Now it all makes sense.

------
benologist
These companies still routinely conspire against their own workers to slightly
increase profits by reducing benefits, salaried roles, sick pay etc.

~~~
Nevermark
And employees conspire to get more by gaining experience then moving to other
companies, differentiating themselves and asking for raises?

You are describing negotiation.

Companies are not supposed to want to raise wages any more than employees are
supposed to want to lower wages. The balance is how the market puts a value on
different kinds of work and skills.

~~~
benologist
Sometimes it's a negotiation between parties each with some measure of power,
but it can also be completely unilateral like using layoffs and redundancies
and shutdowns and bankruptcies as an accounting tool and not necessarily
because they're losing money or making strategic changes.

------
bvd
I really think that this is crazy. I mean, that they did these kinds of
agreements and actually thought they wouldn't get caught.

------
paul7986
Rules sooner or later will apply!

They didn’t apply to Harvey Weinstein until they did!

------
matz1
Employee compensation at these companies significantly tied to the stock
price. So if these practice somehow outlawed, doesn't mean that company will
have to spend more thus lower the stock price thus lower the employee
compensation ?

------
ngcc_hk
669 ...

------
keepper
So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this. The other side of
the coin is that these companies pay WAY ABOVE average salaries. I'm
intimately familiar with this having

FAANG companies average of 50% more compensation than average. Especially
outside of the bay area.

Typical range TC Sr. SDE in nyc: 150-250k + Bonus. Typical range TC for Sr.
SDE in nyc: for Google/Facebook/Amazon 300-400k ( and goes higher ).

Only the most well paid Quants working in horrible environments made 500k+
There's a good portion >E5 engineers at these companies making well over that.

Anti-competition is bad.. but they are at the top of the industry on
compensation. :( So again, don't know how to feel about this.

~~~
defen
> So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this.

Just to be clear: you are saying it's possibly ok for a cartel of billionaires
to collude to suppress wages for a bunch of people making six figures? Because
those employees have it "pretty good" and should be happy with what they're
given, even though they are working to build world-historical fortunes and
power for the business owners?

~~~
FireBeyond
Exactly.

I don't think people really understand the gravity of those fortunes.

Jeff Bezos could now (in theory, at market prices) buy Tacoma, Washington.

As in buy every piece of real estate, private and public, all utilities and
infrastructure.

A town of 200,000 people. One man could buy it all. The assessed property
value for 2017 was just over $105B, including government-owned, plus wiggle
room for other properties.

That "should not" be possible. Buying (or being able to buy, rather) a "mid
sized urban city", as an individual.

~~~
Nevermark
> That "should not" be possible.

That actually seems pretty small compared to Bezos impact on global commerce.

I am all for constraints on wealth being created or compounded by political
and market corruption. But see no reason to discourage or cap wealth created
by productive means.

