In Amazing Coincidence, Jeff Bezos Makes Meaningless Announcement He’s “Giving Way” Fortune After Stories of Racist Worker Abuse, Mass Amazon Layoffs
Billionaire “philanthropy” as transparent PR device.
Out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, earth’s second richest person did a press roll out via CNN announcing he’s “giving way” “virtually all” his $124 billion fortune just hours before the company he is founder and chairman of, Amazon, announced over 10,000 people will be losing their job––in what The New York Times calls, “the largest job cuts in the company’s history.” The announcement also comes just 10 days after a lawsuit was filed accusing Bezos of abuse and racial discrimination against his personal domestic workers.
Amazon’s stock price has taken a massive hit over the past few months, with Amazon being the first company ever to lose over $1 trillion in value. To be fair tech industry layoffs of late are an industry standard. Amazon joins Meta (Facebook) which recently laid off 11,000 and Twitter which laid off 3,700. Intel and Snap cut 20% of their workforce and Stripe, Salesforce and Lyft fired 13 percent of their workers. But the timing of Bezos' toothless, vague announcement is noteworthy in light of recent stories undermining Bezos personal brand.
You can see part of CNN’s glossy Amazon press release here:
According to The Guardian, November 3:
Jeff Bezos is being sued by a former housekeeper who claims she was subjected to racial discrimination and forced to regularly climb out of a laundry room window to go to the toilet as she wasn’t allowed to enter the Amazon billionaire’s house except on “cleaning assignment”.
Mercedes Wedaa, who worked cleaning Bezos’s Seattle mansion for three years, claimed in a lawsuit filed in Seattle state court that she and other hispanic cleaning staff were treated differently to white staff. She claims that Bezos’s household manager “became aggressive and abusive” towards her while being “respectful and polite” towards white groundskeepers.
These “fortune give away” announcements are carefully packaged PR roll outs that virtually everyone in the media covers and breathlessly repeats without question. Why they are major news stories isn’t clear. That multi-billionaires set up foundations under their name and control to distribute to their various ideological pay toys is not new or particularly noteworthy. These announcements are rarely met with meaningful skepticism about the fundamental arrangement that allows one person to amass so much power and wealth, or address how, after 20 years of these bold claims of benevolence, those making them keep getting richer than before they announced they were “giving away” their wealth.
After an early 2022 of horrible press involving his relationship with post-conviction Jeffery Epstein and a messy divorced allegedly spurred from these Epstein meetings, Bill Gates, again in July, announced, to much media fanfare, he was “giving away” “virtually all” his $113 billion fortune. Why he needed to announce this again since he already did so in 2008, 2010, and 2018 (sometimes he suggests all of it, other times, half) is unclear but this time—despite his personal net worth increasing 94 percent since he first told us he was giving away his fortune in 2008—presumably he means business.
In 2006, Warren Buffet announced he was “giving away” 85 percent of his $44 billion fortune. Today he is worth $108 billion.
This elite PR shell game is explained in much greater detail by Linsey McGoey in her 2015 book “No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy”, and also this New York Times essay from 2021.
Some defenders of this model of “giving” will say that these Great Men of Philanthropy are earnestly trying to give away all their money but simply make too much too fast to do so. If that’s the case, after 20 years of this strange PR game of”giving away” fortunes while watching them grow, perhaps the media ought to stop framing it this way. If it is the case that the Buffets and Gateses of the world truly want to retire with a modest 10 million dollars and hand the rest to the world’s poor but simply cannot because they’re just too goddamn good at generating wealth then we should stop saying they are giving away their fortunes. If the money is simply cycled back into the philanthropic industrial complex while they continue to remain the top 10 richest people on earth, in perpetuity, then, at the very least, our media should stop credulously telling the reading public these billionaires are “giving away” their fortunes. Does anyone really think Jeff Bezos in 2050 is going to be living out his final days on a small 5 room estate in Napa Valley with only a few million in the bank to hold him over for retirement? What does it mean to “give away” “virtually” all their fortune if they continue to be worth tens of billions and control massive investment portfolios worth tens of billions? What purpose do these puff pieces serve other than convincing the public that our undemocratic, obscenely wealthy and powerful elites—who hoard vaccines, abuse workers, lay off thousands, and use their wealth to protect their class and personal interests—are actually looking out for humanity?
Thanks for this particularly great column. I read you all the time, and always find it rewarding, but have not commented. Keep up the good work.
Any substack recommendations? I’m trying to be on social media less.