Where’s the Andrew Carnegie of Today?
Jeff Bezos is the majority owner of Amazon.
He’s worth in excess of 100 Billion Dollars, on paper. And Amazon is his baby. If I were Jeff Bezos right now, here’s what I would do, TOMORROW MORNING:
I would wake up and put 10 Billion Dollars in a bank account SPECIFICALLY for the purpose of getting every American tested for COVID-19. I would use that money to buy testing materials for both the regular test AND the antibody test.
I would then go to my job and contact the Alphabet corporation (Google owners) and Facebook and ask them to partner with me, Jeff Bezos, to help me figure out who these tests should go to.
Between Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook, they probably have access to the addresses and contact information of 75% of American citizens.
I, as the world’s richest man, will offer to pay for the whole thing, but there’s no doubt that Zuckerberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Majority owners of Facebook and Alphabet) would want to get in on the donation action. They aren’t STUPID enough to let this opportunity pass them by. Elon Musk would definitely want to get in on such an impossible mission.
Then I would dedicate a considerable amount of Amazon resources towards delivery of these tests. Amazon can sidestep shuttered airlines because they have their own planes. And they even have those handy Amazon lockers for pickup. They can use Wholefoods parking lots as a TEMPORARY testing location in places where it is necessary.
Google and Facebook can keep track of the process of testing when people get the kits and provide help desk duties for people who can’t read instructions. And send people shipping labels. They may even need to put some people back to work to get this done. Just TERRIBLE, right?
I think Bezos could get this done with less than 10 billion dollars. That’s one-tenth of his wealth on paper. He would still eat steak every single night of his life.
But the amount of goodwill that he could build for Amazon after such an operation, is IMMEASURABLE. It would be WELL WORTH IT for him to do this. he could win the Nobel Peace Prize for such marvelous action. He would spend ten billion and gain the type of branding that money cannot buy. Bezos would go down in history as a great humanitarian who put people first.
This is something Andrew Carnegie would have done, back in the day. I wonder why we don’t have rich people like that anymore. Besides maybe, Bloomberg.
With every tragedy, comes the opportunity to step up.
