jeff-bezos | Read Write Collect

Bookmarked Jeff Bezos announces Amazon is donating $690,000 to help the country recover from the devastating bushfires (Business Insider)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that the tech company will donate $1 million Australian dollars to help Australia recover from the fires.

Jeremy Berke reports that Jeff Bezos has donated one million dollars to the Australian bushfire crisis. Although this is significantly more than many, Qasim Rashid explains that paying corporate tax would contribute 435x as much.

Amazon Australia made over $1B last year—but paid only $20M in taxes (2% tax rate) by exploiting loop holes.

If Amazon paid Australia’s 30% corp tax, it woulda paid $300M in taxes—ie 435X more than the $690K its giving as charity

TAXATION > PHILANTHROPYhttps://t.co/Bn1xrKxEgM

— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) January 13, 2020

This use of philanthropy is a topic discussed
by Anand Giriharadas in more detail.

Replied to

Bezos (worth $160+b) will fund homeless charity with donations he can deduct from his taxes after forcing Seattle to repeal a tax on his company that would have funded help for homeless. Seattle, meet your feudal lord. https://t.co/RiZnC7yWxn

— Paul Blumenthal d/b/a James McMorgans LLC (@PaulBlu) September 13, 2018

There is something that doesn’t sit right with me with all this supposed ‘charity’. I think Audrey Watters’ captures it best when she says, “there is no accountability in billionaires’ educational philanthropy”

Liked Work-life balance is actually a circle, according to Jeff Bezos (Doug Belshaw's Thought Shrapnel)

All of the most awesome people I know have nothing like a work-life ‘balance’. Instead, they work hard, play hard, and tie that to a mission bigger than themselves.

Whether that’s true for the staff on targets in Amazon warehouses is a different matter, of course. But for knowledge workers, I think it’s spot-on.