Dear Pam Omidyar, Jeff Bezos is a funny man, let’s cook him in a pie and eat him. (Chapter the Third of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”)
February 1st, 2010
Good morning,
Sweetums. How nice to begin
the morning by gazing upon your kind and
gentle face! It is so much more restful than contemplating the
countenances of some of your fellow tech billionaires. Amazon founder Jeff
Bezos, for example — what in the world is that dude always hooting and hollering
about?! He carries on like some crazy Austrian doctor injected him
with a new-fangled formulation of time-released cocaine,
ecstasy, and nitrous oxide, one that periodically
releases a big bump into his
bloodstream.
Actually,
I love that laugh,
and also I have an inkling what’s
tickling Bezos so. He’s the 28th richest
man in the world, possessed of nearly $10 billion as
a result of the power of the internet, and he’s pretty much
keeping it all for himself! Yes, it seems that Jeffrey Preston Bezos is a miser.
Oh sure, he gives a nickel here and a dime there — recently he broke off a whole
$500,000 to help out the millions of people in Haiti who are homeless,
starving, enduring violence and disease and amputations. There’s
3.5 million of them homeless now, so, lessee, that’s, mmm,
fifteen cents apiece! Yo, how ’bout one of you aid
workers flippin’ a nickel and a dime on
that little girl’s tummy
for Bezos!
$500,000
is less than Bezos spends
on the screening room in each of
his houses here, there, everywhere.
And the number is all the more comical when you
contemplate it as a percentage of his almost incomprehensibly
vast net worth. His nearly $10,000,000,000 –
sorry, Pam, a number almost twice as large
as your paltry $5,500,000,000 — is ten
thousand million
dollars.
That number
is too dang big for the mind
to comprehend. Why don’t we start
with a weensier one, a mere one billion?
Here’s a picture of what it looks like when
you pile it up in one place. First, you take a one
hundred dollar bill and set it down. Then you take ten
million more of them (minus one!) and set them
down, too. They cover twelve
standard shipping palettes,
the ones that require
a forklift to
move:
That’s just
a billion, mind you.
Jeff has ten of those. And fifteen
cents for a child amputee with an empty stomach
and no roof over her head. $500,000 out of $10,000,000,000
is .00005%. Wheeeeeee! If I gave an equivalent percentage of my net worth
to the folks stomping around in sewage now in Haiti trying to find a moldy cracker
to feed to their amputee children, it would be…hang on…lessee…ah….ooh —
I would cover my right nostril and give a little ol’ cowboy blow through
my left nostril and land a booger on the kid’s belly. Right next
to the nickel and dime that Jeff Bezos so
magnanimously flipped down
there.
It is funny,
I suppose. Funny in kind
of a messed up way. You’d think — okay,
not you, Pam, maybe, but regular folks like me —
would think that someone who got filthy stinking fartin’-through-silk
got-a-chick-in-the-basement-who-knits-me-a-fresh-roll-of-cashmere-toilet-paper-
every-morning rich from the internet would be interested in how the web
could be used to raise the well-being of others as well. But you’d
be wrong. Here’s what happens when you write Jeff Bezos
with a monstrous biggity idea like
You can
click that to enlarge it,
if you like. It’s a hoot: “We don’t need
no stinkin’ creative ideas
or concepts!”
To be fair,
Bezos is not the only web
billionaire that acts that way. Most of you do.
Actually, he’s relatively warm and cuddly in his response,
because at least he makes one — virtually none of you even bother with
a reply. Like your husband Pierre. He’s a funny guy, too. He’ll have a perfectly
ordinary conversation with me via email about subjects other than funding
what is plainly a stone killer idea for healing and soothing this troubled
planet. Cameras, say. But pop the subject of breaking a tiny
corner off his palette of dough?! (Ooops,
I mean palettes of dough.)
Clam city.
Truthfully,
Sweetums, you’re just the same.
Nearly seven years I’ve been wooing you both,
and you read every word I write, but
whisper back when it comes
to money?
Nah.
Help me
out here, darlin’.
I know you love love like I know your
husband loves cameras. But I’ve been studying love all my
life, and I can’t understand this version of it. This nickel-and-diming,
booger on the stomach, we-got-it-all-and-nobody-
else-can-have-any kind
of love.
Your eyes
are so kind, Pam. Your mind
is so fine. Won’t you
‘splain this one
to me?
Some people
got barely enough
skin to cover their bones…
some of these people gonna
strip you of all they
can take.
When small men
begin to cast big shadows, it means that
the sun is about to set.
Real innovation
in technology involves a leap ahead,
anticipating needs that no one really knew they
had and then delivering capabilities
that redefine product
categories.
