> Jeff Bezos founded Amazon 30 years ago and is now worth more than $200 billion

Computing someone's net worth by multiplying the number of shares he holds by the last-traded price of that share yields a theoretical number that's only good for placing people on Forbes rich lists and as fodder for demagogues. It is not possible for him to actually convert all of his shares to $200B.

> gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years

If anyone could be blamed for this, blame the Fed for endless ZIRP, QE, and other asset-inflationary policies that made it so that capital had to pour into companies like AMZN.

> a large group who does most of the work ends up begging for scraps while a small owner elite collects the lion's share of the rewards

A large group of people who are compensated for the work they do and are free to choose to work for a different employer.

> is not fundamentally all that different from a feudal peasant society divided between peasants and nobles

Is it valid to compare someone who started a company in and then benefited from a system of (mostly) voluntary exchange of goods and services to feudal lords who extracted rents from their peasants under the threat of violence?

Amazon has been incredibly hostile to labor rights for their employees, including worker safety, fair compensation, parental leave, provision of basic benefits, reasonable schedules, collective bargaining, etc. They've been cited by federal labor judges for systematic unlawful behavior, and are under congressional investigation. Hopefully there will be some real consequences sometime soon. I'm not holding my breath though.

In the markets for package delivery and warehouse logistics, Amazon's uncompetitive and worker-abusive business practices and basic design have been putting systematic pressure on other firms to similarly mistreat their own workers to compete. In the more general retail market, Amazon's unlawful (but thus far substantially unpunished) anti-competitive business practices drive smaller competitors out of business and extract rents not just from Amazon's own workers/contractors and suppliers but from the economy broadly.

> are free to choose to work for a different employer

This is certainly more true than in a feudal economy where peasants are literally considered the personal property of the lord, but in many of the relevant local labor markets Amazon is a disproportionately large and influential employer without enough local employer competition that employees can easily switch jobs. The only real way for employees to get a fair bargain in such situations is collective bargaining via a union, but Amazon is notoriously opposed to union formation at its facilities, which it blocks unlawfully wherever it can.

Amazon doesn't use systematic physical brutality or murder to maintain their power, as done by e.g. feudal lords or drug gangs, but they do routinely (unlawfully) threaten workers with loss of pay/benefits or termination when those workers exercise their legally protected rights, and unlawfully follow through on those threats when workers persist. Since most people need to collect a paycheck to survive, this kind of violence is not entirely dissimilar to more direct physical attack.

> Amazon's uncompetitive

Could you expand on this? If they were uncompetitive, from a worker perspective, they wouldn't have any workers. Having workers means they are the best choice out of all the other companies competing for those workers. It, quite literally, means all the other choices were even worse!

Amazon's model for package delivery is to hire "contractor" companies who then hire workers to drive around Amazon-marked vehicles to deliver nothing but Amazon packages, working under a long list of rules imposed by Amazon. These workers are effectively Amazon employees, but don't get the ordinary protections that would be afforded to workers hired directly by Amazon. Compared to other delivery drivers they have less training, higher turnover (less experience), higher delivery quotas, harsher schedules, worse pay/benefits, less job security, and no collective bargaining. This puts downward pressure on every other package delivery company, but those companies (and national postal services) can't legally mistreat their employees in the same ways Amazon can. This gives Amazon an uncompetitive advantage by reducing their costs below their competitors' costs, in a way that is unlawful and would be impossible if existing labor laws were vigorously enforced. However, they have thus far managed to evade legal responsibility in many (but not all) jurisdictions.

I get your point about misclassifying de facto employees as contractors, and also wanting as a society to avoid a race to the bottom in this type of stuff, but the fact remains that the delivery workers are voluntarily choosing to work with the compensation and under the conditions described. I presume that despite all the downsides you listed, it was the best possible option for them.

> This puts downward pressure on every other package delivery company

If in fact turnover is as high as you say, it would seem that it actually wouldn't be competitive over the long run; the overall customer experience would be worse and eventually Amazon would run out of people to work for them.

I think you're saying that this is the labor equivalent of the anti-competitive practice of dumping, but I'm not sure if it translates exactly.

> So he has personally gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years.

He was paid that by Amazon investors, who basically want to give him money because he's Jeff Bezos. If the warehouse workers owned the shares, those investors would have to want to give just as much money to them, but it doesn't seem like they do.

(Clearer case is Elon, who is pretty obviously super rich entirely because a lot of people want to specifically give him money. They're investor celebrities.)