Jeff Bezos explains why he didn’t take additional equity building Amazon

Throughout your whole career at Amazon, it appears to me like you paid yourself about $80,000 a year in total. Yeah, Cash comp. And never took additional equity in the company the entire time?

No, I never did. And I asked the comp committee of the board not to give me any comp. And I, the, My view was I was a founder. I had, I already owned a significant amount of the company and I just didn't feel good about taking more. I felt I had plenty of incentive. It was, you know, I owned, you know, more than 10% of the company, you know, more earlier, you know, before it was diluted by various Things, more than 20% of the company. And it was, I just felt how could I possibly need more incentive than owning such a. You know, most founders own big chunks of the company they don't really need. They're more like owner operators. The way they increase their wealth is not by getting comp, you know, more equity. They just want to make the equity they have more valuable. And so I never, I just would have felt icky about it. And I really, I'm actually very proud of that decision. I sometimes wish that there were a. And maybe you can do this, Andrew, or maybe the Washington Post will do this, but somebody needs to make a list where they rank people by how much wealth they've created for other people. And so instead of the Forbes list, it ranks you by your own wealth. So, you know, Amazon's market cap is 2.3 trillion today. I own about, you know, 200 billion ish of it. So if you take 2.3 billion and subtract out the piece I kept from myself, then, you know, I've created something like 2.1 trillion of wealth for other people. That should put me pretty high on some kind of list. And, and that's a better list. You know, how much wealth have you created for other people? You know, people like Jensen Nvidia, he's going to be very high on that list. And that would be a pretty cool list. Somebody should do that list.

I think that is a very cool list.