Astral Codex Ten

Jeff Bezos

17 min read

Jeff Bezos

Article

Jeff Bezos is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 17 times across 17 issues between January 28, 2021 and January 09, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “What about Jeff Bezos? Is Bezos’ fortune “just normal wealth”?”; “Jeff Bezos might as well be a different species”; “Jeff Bezos, for all his billions, is only upper-middle-class at best”. It most often appears alongside Amazon, Elon Musk, Twitter.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 17
  • Issue count: 17
  • First seen: January 28, 2021
  • Last seen: January 09, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics
January 28, 2021 · Original source
What about Jeff Bezos? Is Bezos’ fortune “just normal wealth”?
Taxometrically: yes. Jeff Bezos falls on the same continuum as everyone else. You can add one dollar to your own net worth, and keep doing that, and eventually end up at Jeff Bezos’ net worth. At every point in between - a few hundred thousand, a few million, a few tens of millions - there will be some people at that point. There’s no clear distinction into two disjoint groups, where you’re in one and Jeff Bezos is in the other.
Practically: no. Practically, Jeff Bezos might as well be a different species. If your idea of wealth is a doctor who makes $200,000 a year, you’re totally unprepared to think about Jeff Bezos. Your whole economic world between the poor single mother and the rich doctor occupies one order of magnitude; Jeff Bezos is five orders of magnitude beyond it.
Book Review: Fussell On Class
February 24, 2021 · Original source
The middle classes are salaried professionals, starting with the upper-middle class. Jeff Bezos, for all his billions, is only upper-middle-class at best. So are many of the other people you think of as rich and famous and successful. The upper-middle-class likes New England, Old England, yachts, education, good grammar, yachts, chastity, androgyny, the classics, the humanities, and did I mention yachts?
A friend urges me to think of these not as "rich/successful people" vs. "poor/unsuccessful people", but as three different ladders on which one can rise or fall. The most successful proles are lumber barons or pro athletes or reality TV stars. These people are much richer and more powerful than, say, a schoolteacher, but they’re still proles, and the schoolteacher is still middle class. Likewise, a very successful middle class person might become a professor or a Senator or Jeff Bezos, but this doesn't make them even a bit upper class.
Highlights From The Comments On Class
March 05, 2021 · Original source
Surely Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, as people with immensely vast fortunes and high profile businesses, must have more power and influence than many of the people he is defining as upper class. Could no amount of that break them into the high class category, even if they imitated high class taste and manners?
Maybe one possibility is that even though the upper class is invisible or uninteresting to you and me, other rich people envy them and want to be them? If Jeff Bezos feels some kind of pressure to get into the cool country clubs, and part of that pressure requires him to suck up to old money, then that might give old money some kind of power or at least justify calling them a “higher class” than Jeff Bezos. I doubt this is true for literal Jeff Bezos - he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to care too much about that kind of thing - but maybe it’s true for enough people that it matters?
21
June 22, 2021 · Original source
Will Jeff Bezos make a big investment in anti-aging this year? 25% Aubrey de Grey has hinted that somebody really big is about to get into the anti-aging/longevity field, and speculation has centered on a newly-retired and not-getting-any-younger (so far!) Jeff Bezos. This prediction resolves as true if Bezos puts at least $50 million into anti-aging.
Inline links: 25%
Book Review: The Scout Mindset
September 29, 2021 · Original source
Galef says not necessarily. Did you know that Jeff Bezos said outright he started off with a 30% chance Amazon would succeed, even going so far as to tell investors “I think there’s a 70% chance you’re going to lose all your money”? Or that Elon Musk said the odds of SpaceX working were “less than 10%”? Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said he’s “never had 100% confidence in cryptocurrency as a sector…I’m consistent in my uncertainty”. And since the book came out, I stumbled on this profile of billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, which says he believed his chances of success “were only 20% to 25%”.
Inline links: this profile
Links For November
November 25, 2021 · Original source
1: The story of Jeff Bezos’ biological father, a former circus performer who didn’t realize Jeff was his son until well into the 2010s.
Inline links: The story of Jeff Bezos’ biological father
Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?
December 09, 2021 · Original source
Bill Gates, the world's fourth richest person, owns 242,000 acres of farmland across the U.S., making him the #1 owner of private farmland in the USA. But that's just farmland. If you're talking about all land in the USA, Gates ranks #49. Jeff Bezos is #25, and Ted Turner is #4. Rich people own a lot of land.
Inline links: #1 owner of private farmland in the USA, all land in the USA
Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep
March 24, 2022 · Original source
This has been brought about through the choices of individuals and governments. Maybe nobody specifically says “I choose for Jeff Bezos to be a billionaire and Somali orphans to starve to death.” But a lot of people keep giving more money to Jeff Bezos and not helping Somali orphans. And governments generally enforce (or at least refuse to intervene against) the economic system that makes this keep happening. And voters keep re-electing the politicians who allow this.
Why do I find this so much easier to swallow than eg climate justice or economic justice? I guess it’s because climate justice involves summing up a bunch of things which are not themselves unsympathetic (me playing computer games, you playing computer games, so on x 1 billion) yet happen to have bad consequences. Economic justice is the same way - I spend my money on things I want and find useful, you spend your money on things you want and find useful, and at the end we find that Jeff Bezos has $200 billion and a Somali orphan has $0. It doesn’t seem intuitively bad to play computer games or to spend your money on things you want and find useful. Whereas the animal problems really are “someone captures and tortures and kills a bunch of animals”. I guess I’m bringing in sketchy stuff like the act/omission distinction and the doctrine of double effect here, but this really does seem pretty different from the other two cases.
Impact Markets: The Annoying Details
July 15, 2022 · Original source
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, sold off some of his equity for seed funding, and kept some other equity for himself. As Amazon grew, the equity appreciated in value, making him very rich.
Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability
August 31, 2022 · Original source
Suppose Amazon creates $1 trillion in extra value for the world, it gets split 50-50 with consumers, Amazon makes $500 billion, that gets split 50-50 with labor and other stockholders, and Jeff Bezos ends up with $250 billion. The standard argument would say that this is fair compensation for the $1 trillion Amazon provided to the world.
But suppose that we go back in time and prevent Jeff Bezos from ever being born. Does this mean Amazon wouldn’t exist today? Probably not by that name. But does it mean that we wouldn’t be buying things online today? That we would have to walk to the brick-and-mortar store every time we wanted a book? Does it mean that Internet retail would be split across a hundred different storefronts, none of which had a good selection or was easy to use?
It might mean that. But I think “Internet retail giant which dominates the market through economies of scale” is a natural niche which Jeff Bezos won the race to fill. When I say “natural niche”, I don’t want to discount Bezos’ accomplishment - I certainly didn’t notice that niche in 1994, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have had the business acumen to fill it effectively. I just mean that, probably sometime between 1994 and today, someone with business acumen would have noticed that niche and filled it successfully. Maybe not quite as successfully as Bezos. But successfully.
Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 22, 2022 · Original source
But I also want to make an economic response: I’m not sure “what rewards need to be offered to incentivize people?” is the right question. Suppose Jeff Bezos just really loved founding businesses, and couldn’t imagine working for anyone else, and he would found and run Amazon for $10/day, just enough to live in a tent in one of his warehouses and eat cold beans. Does that mean society would optimally pay him that amount? Maybe this isn’t true because in some kind of hypothetical perfect society, all money would be distributed evenly, so nobody should get less than GDP/population, but sometimes we need to give people more, and we’re just trying to figure out how much more, when?
We can go back further: Jeff Bezos’ parents invested $300,000 in Amazon in 1995; sources say that’s now worth $30 billion. A warehouse worker who got paid in stock that year (this is hypothetical: there were no warehouses or public shares) would now have $3 billion.
Inline links: sources say
How much actual spending power does Jeff Bezos have access to?
Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
This review/book seems to presume that he has random obsessions and just happened to make electric cars and rockets -- it's pretty clear that rocketry needed major improvements and that those improvements were technically possible, same with clean energy/electric cars. Those were also at the burning core of America's national interest. This is a man who loves sex, video games, and porn - an accomplished womanizer who jets around including with Hollywood actresses. He's ravenous for all that life has to offer and takes a big bite out of everything. Yet he'll still buckle down and work day and night on what he thinks is important -- sacrificing an AAA class lifestyle long periods of time. How many people have "made it" and kept swinging in that manner? None of the other major tech people seem to have that fight in them - they shoot their shot and then move on to their foundation. Where's Jeff Bezos? Where are Larry and Sergei? Where's Bill Gates?
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
36: Amazon has added an incredibly annoying popup thing called “Rufus” that appears on every page now and can’t be turned off (Jeff Bezos would be turning in his grave). If you can’t figure out a good non-Amazon way to get the products you need, here’s a good description of how to banish it using uBlock.
Inline links: here’s a good description of how to banish it using uBlock
ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
October 30, 2024 · Original source
Another is that Trump might threaten opponents with jail time (or simply loss of government contracts) unless they support him. I don’t know whether Jeff Bezos’ decision to shift Washington Post away from endorsing Harris was motivated by fear, but it’s a good model for the type of situation I worry about.
Inline links: Jeff Bezos’ decision to shift Washington Post away from endorsing Harris
Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
They keep the kids motivated so they put in the daily effort and don’t get burned out What Alpha is doing is not rocket science. They are just “following the science” for what has been proven to work, and then designing a school around the best way (or “a way”) to deliver that science - personalized instruction, mastery focus, spaced repetition and incentives. It should not be too surprising that when it all comes together it spits out measurable results. But will it hold? Part Six: A Response to Bryan Caplan "When the data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. It’s usually not that the data is being miscollected. It’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing." — Jeff Bezos (on multiple occasions) Not only does Bryan Caplan convincingly argue that education is mostly signalling in his book “The Case Against Education”, he goes even further to pour cold buckets of water on aspirational parents in his book “Selfish Reasons to have more Kids”. In that latter book he makes a compelling case with unimpeachable data that how kids turn out is almost entirely due to their genes plus “non-shared environment” (i.e., random things not having to do with parenting). According to Caplan helicopter-parenting does not hurt your kids, it is just a waste of everyone’s time (and maybe their enjoyment during their childhood). You might be able to influence some of your kids' behavior in the short term, but once they become an adult and move out of your house they will revert to the biases of their genes. As Caplan says, the most important parenting decision you can make that will affect how your kids turn out is your choice of spouse (or more accurately your choice of the genes you use to build your kids). Caplan does put one caveat on his data: range restriction. He admits that all of his adoption studies focus on middle class Americans (and Europeans). He is the first to admit that if you take a baby out of extreme poverty in the developing world and raise him in a middle class American family, he will have better economic outcomes than if you leave him in rural Mauritania (see his “Open Borders” book). He may even grant that moving from the poorest broken families in America to the middle class also may make a difference – since all the data available comes from families who were approved by administrators as acceptable to raise adopted kids. But is the same thing true when you move from the middle of the bell curve to the right? When the Data Set Gets Bigger Raj Chetty’s neighbourhood-impact study cracked the range challenge open. Chetty had access to all IRS filing data for generations. He was able to focus on families with multiple children that moved to significantly different zip codes, and follow those children over extended periods of time. By having millions of data points he could tease apart the impact of moving to a “better” zip code for older vs younger siblings. The younger sibling had the same family environment (and 50% of the same genes), but some number of more years in the “better” neighborhood. Chetty found that better neighborhoods made a difference to long term outcomes. But isn’t the neighborhood where a family lives in a “shared environment”? Clearly some adopted families lived in better neighborhoods than others? Why didn’t Caplan’s adoption studies pick that up? I think part of the answer is noise. Chetty had millions of data points vs hundreds of thousands for the adoption studies. But mostly I think the reason Chetty found this impact while the adoption studies did not is that he was looking for different things. No one took the adoption studies and grouped the zip codes as the relevant input variable. As Bezos says, the data wasn’t miscollected, they were just looking at the wrong things. So what does a good zip code look like? Chetty summarizes a good zip code as: Short commutes
Inline links: Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education, Selfish Reasons to have more Kids, Open Borders, neighbourhood-impact study
Open Thread 415
January 05, 2026 · Original source
Pride might matter - there could be permanent monetary inequality in a post-AGI world, and even if everyone is richer than today, your neighbor could be permanently richer than you (”a 20% bigger moon”), and this might grate for some people. But wealth is only one kind of potentially-permanent-inequality: Jeff Bezos, Bernie Sanders, Malala Yousafzai, Tyler Cowen, Dolly Parton, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chesley Sullenberger all have different types of status. Even if you’re thinking in terms of how you’ll be better than the Joneses in the distant changeless future, I encourage you to think bigger.
The Permanent Emergency
January 09, 2026 · Original source
Every time the children learn a new word, they test whether it’s a song. When they got into fish, they asked for the fish song. When they saw a butterfly, they asked about a butterfly song. We relay these requests to Alexa, who comes through magnificently - the algorithm knows we want children’s songs related to a certain concept, and can usually find one. I recently learned that there is, in fact, a cottage industry among mildly scummy musicians in creating songs with whatever title they expect young children to ask for - especially “The Poop Song” - and raking in the $0.001 that Jeff Bezos hands out per Alexa impression from mildly mischievous two-year-olds.
Inline links: especially “The Poop Song”