Jeff Bezos explains why he didn’t take additional equity building Amazon Jeff is asked why he only paid himself $80,000 per year and never took additional equity during his tenure as CEO of Amazon. He responds: “I asked the comp committee of the board not to give me any comp. My view was I was a founder. I already owned a significant amount of the company, and I just didn’t feel good about taking more. I felt I had plenty of incentive. I owned more than 10% of the company, and earlier — before it was diluted by various things — more than 20% of the company. I just felt how could I possibly need more incentive?” Jeff continues: “Most founders own big chunks of the company. They’re more like owner-operators. The way they increase their wealth is not by getting more equity. They just want to make the equity they have more valuable. And so I just would have felt icky about it. And I’m actually very proud of that decision.” Jeff is especially proud of how much wealth he’s created for other people: “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 where it ranks you by your own wealth. Amazon’s market cap is $2.3 trillion today. I own about $200 billion-ish of it. So if you take $2.3 trillion and subtract out the piece I kept for myself, then 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 that’s a better list — how much wealth have you created for other people?” Video source: @nytimesevents (2024)