this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
515 points (93.0% liked)
Technology
83032 readers
2945 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Bezos did more than that. He started with "bookstore but online" because it forced Amazon to develop a low-cost, efficient logistics capability that could then be applied to a lot of things besides books.
And as Amazon was growing, Bezos mandated that the Amazon's internal IT infrastructure was built out with APIs that would allow it to be monetized in the future. And that's where AWS came from.
Again, I'm not saying he's a good person. Far from it. It's just that, from a corporate strategy point of view, he actually had strategies that he stuck to, and they paid off. And everyone makes mistakes in business. It's how you recover from them and persevere that makes the difference.
Musk, on the other hand, is much more in the toddler-with-shotgun category.
Does that make Bezos special? The bar is so low that someone doing the bare minimum of what most regular people are actively for is somehow an intelligent thing. His big thing to make money was to undercut local bookstores, that’s what he really did, and even that wasn’t new.
His “income” is around $2,500 per second. He “makes” more than most people do in a lifetime in a matter of minutes(single digit minutes) and what you described is not anything that requires special intelligence to pull off. What made him special was a silver spoon and the willingness to hurt others for personal gain.
Even Steve Jobs’ main quality that made him a standout leader in so many ways was that he simply allowed the people to he was paying to do a job to do that job without being micro-managed, and he told people who tried to get him to chase short-term gains to fuck off. Again, not genius level stuff unless you’re comparing him against the truly stupid and evil, which is most rich people.