Jeff Bezos Paid Himself Only $80K

What this video covers

The psychological aspects of being a founder, referencing Jeff Bezos's early compensation, which suggests a focus on founder mindset and sacrifices.

Transcript

Throughout your whole career at Amazon, it appears to me [music] like you paid yourself about $80,000 a year in total and never took additional equity in the company. The entire [music] time. >> No, I never did. I was a founder. I had I already owned a significant [music] amount of the company. And I just didn't feel good about taking more. >> [music] >> I just felt, how could I possibly need more incentive? Most founders own big chunks [music] of the company. They don't really need They're more like owner-operators. The way they increase their wealth is not by getting you know, more [music] equity. They just want to make the equity they have more valuable. Somebody needs to make a list where they rank people by how much wealth they've created for other people. Instead of the Forbes list [music] that ranks you by your own wealth. You know, Amazon's market cap 2.3

trillion [music] today. I own about, you know, 200 billionish of it. If you take 2.3 billion and subtract out the piece I kept for myself, I've created something like 2.1 trillion of wealth for other people. That should put me pretty high on some kind of list. And uh and that's a better list. You know, what how much wealth have you created for other people? You know, people like Jensen in video. He's going to be very high on that list. That'd be pretty cool list.

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