Jeff Bezos is supremely lucky — which is I think the real takeaway from looking at how he got where he did.

There are tens of thousands of small businesses that start with equally humble beginnings (the cost of starting a business in America is sky-high for a variety of reasons.)

Most of them fail. Very few of them last longer than 5 years. Bezos is lucky, but he’s also talented and enough of a visionary to push Amazon through dry times during the dot com bust. That wasn’t all luck.

The question of who deserves to reap the benefits of owning Amazon stock seems a little tautologous itself. Who else would deserve to benefit from Amazon’s shares going up in price? If you say “well, the entry-level employee of course” it’s not exactly clear why that might be. It’s certainly not supported in this piece. Moreover, many Amazon employees do receive stock as part of their compensation.

The implication is that someone should dismantle Amazon and hand over some large amount of shares to entry-level employees. Maybe I’m getting this wrong…

But if you dismantled Amazon and undermined the ability of owners to dictate ownership, then Amazon’s value as a publicly traded stock would crash precipitously. Neither Bezos or his entry level employees would benefit. And who would oversee this deconstruction?

The value of a company like Amazon is in part thanks to the free exchange of its shares in a transparent marketplace that’s unfettered by anyone’s particular viewpoint of fairness. Take away that free exchange, and no one is going to want to own Amazon. That’s lose-lose.