The Case against Wealth Hoarding

During the coronavirus pandemic, as XX number of people lost their jobs domestically within the United States, Jeff Bezos's personal worth has skyrocketed daily. As of August 2020, Jeff Bezos's networth surpassed $200 billlion, leading some to speculate that he is "the richest man in modern history".The origins of Bezos and Amazon's wealth are rooted in exploitative practices -- against small businesses, their own workers, and the environment. From Amazon Prime subscriptions alone, the online retailer rakes in $23.4 billion annually but the majority of their revenue comes from Amazon Web Services, which is a hosting platform for websites and software.

The annual median American household brought in $61,937 in 2018  [link]. Only in a late stage capitalist nightmare could a single man own more wealth than 32,290 families. To visualize the scope of that inequality, Matt Korostoff's project 1 Pixel Wealth asks: "If one pixel on your screen represents $1,000, just how big would $200,000,000,000 be?" The answer is: so big, it's impossible to comprehend. It's impossible to grasp exactly how much wealth Jeff Bezos is hoarding but it continues to grow by the second. Not only is it incomprehensible, it's unethical. As Lucy Friend says, "Faced with far more money than he could ever manage to spend, at the same time as some of his low-paid workers resort to living in tents, it is not hard to make a moral case against Bezos." [link]